The Most Dangerous Game
by Star and neko
Summary: Getting grabbed off the streets was not fun. Getting thrown in a cell with a bunch of other street kids was less fun. Getting tossed on an island and told to survive being shot at was the least fun of all. Sometimes, Duo hated his luck.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own, you don't sue. We're all happy. Yay.

A/N: So...here's my other fic idea. Spawned about four years ago from a short story of the same title (if you know this story you'll have a general idea of my plot) and wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. This fic is (mostly) finished; I'm down to editing what I've got written, so speed of updates is dependent entirely on my editing speed and nothing else. No need to fear that it'll suddenly get dropped. Sorry about the somewhat short chapters, but I broke them where they split nicely. Such is life.

Last note, please review if you get the chance, even if it's only an "I was here". I'm posting this now before I've got the entire story edited because I kind of need some happy in the next few days. Reviews help with happy. Please leave me one.

Enjoy.

Chapter 1

I looked up as the lock on the door clicked. As it swung open I ducked my head so my hair hid the fact that I was watching the door. Three big, bulky guards, two holding bodies and one glaring around our little concrete block menacingly while holding a gun…damn. There went any idea of trying to sneak out as someone else came in. The hulking guards tossed two limp bodies onto the concrete floor, and I mentally winced; that was going to leave bruises, even though both of them had landed on their sides and not their faces. No one moved as the door clanged shut again. Silence. "Oh, for the love of…" I grumbled, shoving myself up the wall in order to walk in a mostly straight line over to our two new arrivals. Joy. More people added to our already-too-small room.

I automatically scanned the two on my way over, one of those reflexes that generally help keep you alive on the streets. The closer boy was on the short side, brown haired, and looked vaguely Asian; the further boy was also on the small side, black haired with an odd little ponytail, and definitely of Chinese ancestry. The obligatory scruffy clothing was present, which made it hard to tell if either of them had concealed weapons or anything fun like that. I could frisk them while they were unconscious, but it probably wouldn't be worth the time and effort; my knives had been taken when I got grabbed, so I really doubted these guys still had theirs. Plus it wouldn't be fair. While I was all in favor of stealing from people who had too much already and could afford it, stealing from fellow street rats is unethical; we've usually only got what we absolutely need to survive. Weapons aside, at least both of these guys were small enough that neither of them would be taking up too much of our quickly vanishing elbow room…I reached down, intending to shift the closer body into a more comfortable position, then froze as a piercing blue eye snapped open and glared at me.

Thankfully for my peace of mind, the glare shifted off me and onto the other prone figure. "Wufei, status!" the boy who _should_ have been unconscious snapped as he quickly shoved himself in the direction of upright.

"Fine," his companion snapped back as he levered himself up.

I just sat back on my heels to stare for a second. Okay…two new guys. Who were conscious upon being thrown in here. And who were also, I noticed from my now-closer vantage point, too well filled out to be street rats like the rest of us. Sure, they had the clothes and the dirt, but anyone who's been on the streets for any length of time gets a hollow look to their features that these two didn't have. And that was interesting. It probably also meant…"So, since the two of you seem to be conscious and functioning, got any clue where the hell we are and why the hell we're in it?" I grinned upwards at them since they'd managed to stand completely while I was thinking. Without wobbling, I noted, something I was still in the process of managing myself and I'd been in here and awake for several hours. It made me slightly jealous. I got two flat stares for my trouble. "Oh, come on, all the rest of us got thrown in here completely out of it. Spill."

A speaking glance was exchanged. Sure I couldn't read it, but that doesn't mean I didn't know it was there! "We both recognized the smell of the chloroform and decided it was safer to feign unconsciousness. We have no more idea where we are than the rest of you."

_Uh huh. You pretend that's true and I'll pretend to believe you. For now_. "Welp, I'm Duo. These are Sue, Billy, George, Anna, Sam, Maria, and Tom." I pointed at each unmoving body as I listed off names. Everyone else was huddled against the wall still pretending none of this was actually happening. I would've liked to've joined them, but I was more interested in actually trying to get out of the problem than in ignoring it. _At least I got them to give me their names before they all went comatose on me. Man, I'm bored…_ I looked expectantly up at my reluctant conversation partners. God, I love talking to people who don't want to answer but feel they have to. It's so much fun to watch them squirm.

"Heero and Wufei," the one who'd been doing the talking answered, nodding at his scowling friend in turn.

Yep, they knew each other_. _If the three word conversation upon arrival had not confirmed that, the fact that Heero answered for Wufei would have made it obvious. If they couldn't or wouldn't tell me what's going on…time to do something stupid. What the hell, I was bored anyway. "Great. Well, if you two've got no clue about what's happenin', I think I'll try to find out." I shoved myself off the floor and crossed the room−with only a s_light _wobble I'll have you know−and banged on the door. "Hey out there!" I hollered. "I've been sittin' here for hours and I'M BORED! Can we get on with whatever the point of this is?" Silence was my answer. Does no one know how to answer a simple question without either prodding or a ridiculously long wait? "Tough crowd, apparently," I muttered before going back to yelling. By now damn near everyone was looking at me like I was nuts. "At least tell us what the point of this is! Don't make me sing The Song That Gets on Everybody's Nerves!"

"PIPE DOWN IN THERE!" floated down the hall. I grinned.

"Just one hint? Are we being sold into slavery or something, because if so, that's totally illegal in this country! When the cops find you, you're fucked! They'll come here and shut you down and send you to jail permanently and whatever money you're makin' won't be worth it!" Our two not-street-kids both had an odd look on their faces after that little tirade, which pretty much just confirmed an idea I'd had since they first showed up. Cops impersonating street kids only fool people who aren't looking closely and aren't street kids.

"Argh, SHUT UP!" This time footsteps echoed down the hall following the shout. "This ain't no slavery ring and the cops'll never catch on to disappearing street trash like you, so keep your trap shut! You're all going to end up dead anyway, so if you don't know what's good for you and pipe down, I'll go in there and kill you myself!" The last sentence was punctuated by a rattle and bang on the door. "Any more yelling and you're history!" The footsteps clomped off again at a sharp pace.

"Well, _shit_," I muttered. I was pretty sure he wasn't kidding, which meant we were in a lot more trouble than I'd originally thought. I'd figured, street kids getting grabbed, had to be slavery, right? Which I could get out of no problem. Wait until they put me in a cage with a reachable lock or until someone bought me and put me somewhere with a reachable lock, pick the lock and run like hell. But if it wasn't slavery…I had no idea what it was. And the guard had said we were all going to die soon, which was not encouraging.

I took a look around the room. The unhelpful wall lumps were still unhelpful and now looking even a bit more lump-like. The two don't-fit-ins were looking as blank-faced as before, but now I thought I might see a tad of worry there too. Which was not encouraging either. Because if my guess was right, they were definitely undercover cops. And if they were worried, they might be just as stuck as the rest of us, and therefore of no help at all. Damn.

The only way in or out of the 15x15 room we were in was the door, so I sat down next to the nearest wall, joining the wall-lump brigade, and studied it. No lock on the inside, so that was out. The hinges were on the inside, but were thick and new, so that was out without a wire cutter and mine was…currently in my Burnside bolt hole. I hadn't needed it for the job I'd had planned for…tonight? Last night? Impossible to tell without a window. Either way, still stuck in a concrete cell with zero windows, including on the door. Couldn't even annoy the guards by staring at them. Damn. Prob'ly would've been useless, but it would have been entertaining…

Chances of anyone else being helpful? I glanced around. Ten of us sitting against the walls now: seven true street kids all between the ages of 12 and 17 if I was any judge, myself, and our two probable law enforcement types. From reputation and gossip I knew all the others off the streets were either beggars, whores, or pickpockets, so no tools from them, and a plain knife, provided anyone still had one, which was unlikely, wouldn't be much help. And if I was right about our undercover cops, they wouldn't have sneak thief tools with them to begin with. Especially a metal cutter; there were very few legal uses for one of those, and most of them involved scrapyard work.

In a nutshell, all of us were SOL. Throw a couple Fs in there for emphasis. With a lack of anything better to do, I slid into a completely prone position and closed my eyes. Some more sleep would hopefully clear the rest of the drugs from my system, and maybe life would improve by the time I opened my eyes and there'd be a way out of here.

And maybe I'd suddenly have a Swiss bank account. I can dream.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I still don't own 'em.

A/N: So here's chapter two. Don't worry, the plot will kick in soon. Again, sorry about the shortness; the chapters do get longer as this goes. I promise. Reviews would be appreciated.

Warnings, since I forgot to put them in chapter 1: language, violence, 1+2, 3+4. AU. I think that's it.

Chapter 2

It was an annoyingly long time later that the door to our boring cell opened again. I really wished I could be more certain about the time interval, or even guess an actual interval, but I'd never realized before how much I relied on the sun and the clocks around town to keep track of time. And now I was really, really wishing I had a watch.

No one was thrown into the room this time. Instead, three goons with guns−possibly the same goons as last time; I wasn't paying that much attention and it's not like it mattered anyway−gestured all of us out into the corridor and lined us up…and then shackled us all into a line like all those old textbook pictures of slaves in galleys. You know, everyone has a cuff on each wrist and each cuff is attached to a long chain. Except our wrist cuffs were attached to each other so we had no free hand movement at all, which sucked muchly. I was stuck near the middle of the line, between Maria, who was quietly sniffling, and Heero, who seemed to be trying to glare a hole in the guard closest to him. More power to him and I hoped it worked; I really disliked these guys.

We were marched along like an odd set of ducklings, clanking the entire way through boring white hallways and doors and even down a flight of boring stairs−was _anything_ around here interesting? And navigating stairs when you can't grab the railing is Not Fun−until we reached a pair of−gasp!−_steel_ doors that opened onto night in a sheltered cove out of a bad pirate movie. I rolled my eyes. Was there no originality left at all? Between the chains and the setting I was beginning to think we were bound for slavery after all. Obviously they were going to try to take us someplace else, but whenever we got there I could pick the lock on my cuffs and high tail it for the nearest city.

We were marched into the ship and down into the hold where the end of the chain was locked to a ring near the door; paranoid much? It was a good thing there were only ten of us, because it wasn't a huge ship and there wasn't that much room. Some water bottles were thrown in with us and the door to the top deck was locked behind us. Luckily, we had a light in the room with us so we could see. Unluckily, it showed rather clearly that the lock on the door was inaccessible from the inside again. Damn. The water was nice though, since they hadn't fed us or given us anything to drink the entire time back in the cell.

The ship's engines rumbled to life and the boat juddered around us as we passed the water down the line so everyone could drink. Hey, we're street kids, not savages! When you go without as often as we do, you learn to live with what little you get and help others when you can. If you don't help when given the chance, no one will ever help you when you need it; turnabout is fair play.

About half the bottles were emptied and the rest were left for later, since the boat was definitely moving now and none of us knew how long the trip would be. I was bored again, since the wall lumps were still being quiet and lumpy and the two odd ones out weren't talking either, so I surreptitiously pulled a lock pick out of my hair and set about making sure I could get out of my cuffs if necessary. I was already damned sure I could, but it never hurt to check. I was right, it only took about two minutes of fiddling and I had them unlocked.

I'd had my knees up as a screen, fiddled in such a way that my hands were out of general view, and been pretty much silent, so I'd thought I'd been unobtrusive enough about it that no one noticed. Unfortunately, when I looked up after quietly relocking the cuffs I found I had blue eyes glued to me. I winced. I didn't want anyone else knowing I could get out because I didn't know if I'd be able to get anyone else out. Helping others by sharing food and water is all well and good, but that's not a decision that could get everyone, or even anyone, killed. Group effort here would likely end in somebody dead, since it's kinda hard for ten people to all up and take off at once without being noticed and shot at, so my lockpicking being general knowledge was a Bad Plan. Even if they didn't kill us they'd catch us and take my lockpicks, and then we'd all be back at square one and I'd be completely screwed too.

Apparently Heero had the same idea I did, since he didn't say anything, although his eyes flicked to Wufei and they had another silent conversation. I was really getting sick of those. When they finished their silent tete-a-tete, the two police flunkies were looking…speculative. Oops. Either I'd just painted 'asset' on my forehead or they were putting two and two together and getting 'thief'. Or worse, both. Any way it went it could be a bad thing, but nothing I could do about it now. Although it was kind of disconcerting since Heero was directly next to me and Wufei was right next to him. Double stares with an impact. Ouch.

I sighed and shifted the location of my butt by several inches. Hopefully this trip would be relatively short, both for a 'getting home' standpoint and a 'damn this hurts' standpoint. There's only so comfortable you can get when you're hooked to someone on your right and your left and there's limited leg room anyway.

I thumped my head back against the wall. I wanted to be home, back in my hidey-hole with no worries besides my next thieving job or next day working for some money at the junkyard. I'd've given up the thieving for the junkyard if I could; I liked messing around with scrap. But I couldn't work at the junkyard as a steady job; the guy who actually owned the place wouldn't've let me work at all, but his second-in-command was okay with it as long as I didn't get caught. Of course, that meant I couldn't work when the big boss was actually around, and I got paid under the table so it was a pittance at best, but it did help me squeak through the rough times.

In a roundabout way, I could blame the big boss for my current predicament, which was kind of nice since I didn't like him already for having such a stick up his ass about not hiring an "uneducated workforce." And I was getting sick of blaming myself for this mess. I hadn't had many chances to work my "honest" job lately since there hadn't been any trips to call Mr. Head Honcho out of town recently, which was why I had been out thieving and in a place to get myself caught. No food is a good motivator for going to steal some. Getting food was simple: pick the lock on the service door that leads to the pantry, grab nonperishables, sneak away unobtrusively and lock the door behind me in hopes of confusing people as to whether anything is missing. Unfortunately, the previous night's trip had included the unexpected and unwanted get grabbed from behind in a dark alley before getting anywhere close to the target building. I officially hate chloroform.

And now, I was on a boat, going who knows where. Yay. I really didn't want to blame myself for this one. I was also kind of hoping we'd get somewhere soon so I could take off. I was hungry and very very tired of twiddling my thumbs.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: still don't own.

And welcome, everyone, to the plot. Isn't it fun? Reviews make me happy. Being happy makes me post sooner. If nothing else, let me know you were here and didn't hate it. Side note, if anyone finds a typo/grammar error, tell me. I'm a grammar stickler myself, so if anything slipped my proofreading I'd like to know so I can fix it. Enjoy.

Chapter 3

Unfortunately, I got to twiddle my thumbs for a good two more hours before the sound of the boat engine changed and that woozy feeling of deceleration on a moving surface decided to kick in; not comfortable, in case you were wondering. If I got a choice, I was probably never getting on a boat again after this fun trip; getting kidnapped for nefarious purposes can take the fun out of anything.

It was another five-ish minutes before I thought we'd actually come to a stop, although it was hard to tell. That moving surface thing again. Clomping noises from updeck preceded the unlocking of the door, followed summarily by the unlocking of the chain from the wall by the door and the hauling of our sorry asses out of the hold. Surprisingly enough, the entire chain brigade stayed cooperative. Maybe I wasn't the only one with escape plans. Actually, with cops around I could pretty much guarantee I wasn't the only one with escape plans. But other than them, go figure; maybe the wall lumps were just too traumatized to put up a fuss. Who knows.

Out on deck, the sun was starting to maybe think about rising but not quite yet, so visibility was limited but existent. I just about started cursing a blue streak, but the nice visual of Burly Guards (I decided that had to be the official title; there was no other explanation for the cookiecutterness of their physiques) casually holding big guns dissuaded me from drawing attention to myself. The boat was parked at a beach. It was not docked because there was no dock. And the beach just stretched on to the left and the right. And straight ahead was just some sort of really old looking forest. No city, no town, no houses, not even a mansion. The only other thing in the area was another, larger boat right next to ours. What the fuck?

The mass confusion of the chained was interrupted by a Burly Guard hauling on the chain and pulling all of us stumbling to the edge of the boat, where apparently, finally, someone decided to inform us of what was going on.

I was going to call this guy Clerk. He was a twig with the kind of build that meant he'd spent all his working time with his ass applied to a chair and never lifted anything heavier than a full portfolio. He also had a sneer on his face and the kind of look that says the one being stared at (or past, in this case) is not in any way, shape, or form human. I wanted to punch him. "The ten of you," Clerk started in monotonously, "are here to please our clients. Our clients have hunted big game the world over, and have been very disappointed with the results."

I felt my brain disengage slightly. _Whoa, back up. Game? Please tell me he's not saying what I'm hoping he's not saying._

"A conference between some of our clients gave way to a final solution of sorts; animals simply aren't intelligent enough to challenge a true hunter. The only real prey would be another being capable of thinking and reasoning as well."

_Oh fuck. He is_.

"You are about to be moved to the island. You will have five minutes head start to begin the chase; after that you are on your own in terms of abilities. If you hide well enough you may even survive this round and live for a bit longer. Please do not disappoint our clients." And he turned and walked back into the cabin he must have come out of.

Sometime during the confirmation of what I hadn't wanted to hear, my brain had disengaged the rest of the way and was now stuck running in a little hamster wheel going nowhere yelling . I didn't snap out of it until the Burly Guards had unlocked our cuffs from the chain. "Oh HELL n-" I started before I and the rest of our ragged bunch were tossed over the railing like sacks of potatoes. I twisted into a limp ball in the air to take as little damage from the fall as possible and managed to spit out an impressive string of expletives before I hit the water.

It wasn't that far of a fall, luckily, and the water wasn't that deep, also luckily because I don't swim well under normal circumstances, so swimming with my hands locked together was going to be virtually impossible.

The ten of us dragged ourselves out of the water, some with a bit more coordination than the others. As soon as we hit water-free sand we looked at each other. Best bet was the other boat held hunters; hunters ready to hunt us. And none of us were sticking around for it. We took off for the trees and split up. Laws of the street, help yourself first. Being in a large group together would be a hindrance. I can pretty much guarantee everyone was hoping the hunters−_How many are there? There are ten of us. Are there more hunters than that or less?_−would go for someone else right off the bat and give them a chance to get farther away and better hidden.

As soon as I got under tree cover I started looking for anything to climb or any sort of defensible spot. Nothing immediately looked promising; rocks big enough to trip on but not hide behind, bushes too thin for real cover, trees that were mostly unclimbable, probably from proximity to the beach which I was still too close to anyway. I did, however, see what looked disturbingly like bullet scars in some of the trees. Some part of my mind started gibbering in a corner; the rest of it was hyped up on adrenaline and focused so narrowly on escaping that even if it started panicking it wouldn't register.

Running with my hands shackled together was difficult and slowing me down. Ahead of me I saw a massive rock outcropping and I beelined for it. Hauling myself around the other side and slamming my back into the rock, I yanked the pick I'd been using earlier out of my hair and set to work on the lock on the cuffs. This time I got it done in under a minute, prior practice and terror giving me speed.

Crashing echoed from behind me. There was no way my five minutes were up yet; it had barely been two! I crouched down and started wildly looking for something top use as a weapon. My panic subsided back to manageable levels as two figures obviously closer to my age shot past my boulder. My relief at finding out it was more people from my side faded a bit as they pulled to a stop; it was the cop boys, and it seemed they were looking for me.

They were next to me fast enough I almost thought they'd warped. "Get these off me!" the black-haired boy snapped. He held out his cuffs.

"Are you fucking serious?!" I yelped at him. "I'm getting _out_ of here!" I attempted to shoot past him and take off, but the other boy grabbed my shoulder and hauled me into him so I was pinned against him, between his cuffed arms and facing his partner.

"Get them off, now, or I kill you myself!" he growled in my ear. "We don't have time for this!"

No amount of squirming was doing me any good so I gave up and attacked the cuffs with lockpicks. Thirty seconds later, Wufei's cuffs were on the ground (terrified and pissed and my brain still spits out people's names on command; sometimes I hate the way my mind works). I decided not to wait for any more death threats, and Heero's followed twenty seconds after that. "Now can we _run_, dammit?!"

Heero let go of me and the three of us took off farther into the trees; I considered trying to lose the guys who had probably just gotten me killed, but decided it wasn't worth the effort. Hopefully any pursuers would shoot them first since they were both taller than me. I continued scanning scenery as we ran past. _Need to stop making a trail!_ My hindbrain was yelling at me. Unfortunately, I wasn't seeing anything helpful in that department. I knew rocks or a stream would work, but neither of those were appearing and I was a city boy at heart and lost in the woods.

Heero stopped suddenly and as he had managed to work his way in front of me at some point, I almost ran smack into him. "Wufei!" he snapped and gestured up. Wufei nodded and took two steps, leapt, caught a tree branch, and swung himself up.

I blinked in understanding. The trees would work! We wouldn't leave tracks if we were off the ground. I scanned the area with the new idea in mind; most of the trees were close enough that some branches overlapped, and a lot of them had branches that were thick enough to hold the weight of a scrawny street kid like me. While I'd been scanning, Heero had used a rock as a vault and hauled himself into the tree as well. Well, they'd followed me first. I copied Wufei, taking a running jump to grab a branch and swing the rest of the way up. _And let's hear it for burglary skills…_

I balanced for a minute and plotted part of a course before hauling myself up a few more branches, standing up, and running to vault into the next tree over. Apparently roof-walking skills were transferrable to trees. I heard startled exclamations behind me. I rolled my eyes. Hiding in a tree was a good idea, but our trail still lead right to it. Apparently the two burrs normally known as people agreed with me and again decided to follow. This leap frogging of follow-the-leader had to stop soon.

I continued sliding from one tree to another, doing my best not to break anything obvious and leave a trail. I froze for a second when I heard the first gunblast go off, somewhere far to the left. If I hadn't already been sure our five minutes were up and none of this was a game, that would have clinched it. I kept moving a bit more carefully, trying not to get myself into a tree with no other exit. I had to backtrack once after just that happened. Before that point, Heero and Wufei were a good two trees behind me, but after that we were pretty much neck and neck.

All three of us had been ignoring sporadic gunfire as we moved, although some part of the back of my head was counting blasts. After six I really started wondering if some of these guys were awful shots, which was unlikely if boring prey was their complaint, or if there were more than just the ten of us on this island.

A sound closer than the distant blasts caused us to freeze and shift so we were as screened as possible by leaves and branches. For a bit nothing happened, but I was panicked enough that even if it might be a false alarm, I was _not_ moving until I was sure. Caution appeared to be a good idea, as a figure slid into view a ways away from us, but coming closer. He was holding a gun and dressed in camouflage and obviously searching for tracks on the ground.

We stayed tense and quiet as the hunter moved closer and closer until he moved a little ways past us. I relaxed a bit and got ready to wait for him to leave when he turned and leveled his gun up at our tree. _Son of a bitch!_ I was certain I was about to die, but apparently Heero hadn't relaxed when the guy moved past us. In the instant it took the hunter to figure out exactly which branch we were sitting on, Heero jumped out of the tree and tackled him. The gun went off, but Heero's impact had knocked the barrel aside and the bullet imbedded itself in a nearby tree instead of a person.

I started to scramble down out of the tree so I could run while the hunter was distracted, but I stopped at a wet cracking noise. My eyes widened as I looked again at the scene on the ground. Heero had just broken the other man's neck. The man was half again Heero's height and Heero had taken him down. Just like that. I leaned into the tree, frozen. Heero reached down, picked up the fallen shotgun, and flipped it open to check the load. He set it down, riffled through the dead man's pockets, came out with more ammo, and proceeded to reload the gun. I just stared.

"You two are cops, aren't you?" Apparently my mouth had decided waiting for my brain to give it permission to speak was optional. I found myself the recipient of two glares, one of them from a person who was now armed with a nasty looking gun, and I shrank further into the tree. Then I started mentally yelling at myself for not running when I had the chance.

Heero snorted and bent down to rip strips out of the dead man's shirt. "Yes," Wufei said from above me. "Although if you haven't guessed yet, we're in a bit more trouble than we anticipated." The last part was heavy with irony.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: not mine.

Oh my God, last week of classes workload! GAH! It's Saturday and I'm overworked. *keels over* So here's chapter 4. I'ma go do something that doesn't require brain power now. Enjoy.

Chapter 4

"I think we have a bit of breathing room for now, and some explanation is deserved. We are with the local police, and we were caught by this organization on purpose," Wufei said quietly in the tone of voice of someone accustomed to giving lectures. "This was meant to be an undercover investigation of a simple slavery ring. This…setup is not in any way what we expected or planned for."

"Does that mean we've got no chance of the cops showing up to save our asses?" I asked Wufei. I was listening to him, but my eyes were still glued to Heero, who was currently turning the strips he had ripped off the dead man's vest into a sling for the shotgun.

"There is a chance, but likely headquarters will not realize things are not going according to plan until we miss our assigned check in time, which is not until two days from now. And it will take them longer to locate us after that."

I decided to ignore the fact that locating us would be virtually impossible if no one had had any idea this was going on in the first place. "So, four or more days before the cavalry arrives." _Assuming it does…not thinking about that!_ "It's a good thing running and hiding are my specialties!" I managed a somewhat cheerful grin and got 'Are you _insane_?' looks from my companions. "Hey, there's nothing else I can do about it, so I may as well go with the flow. It keeps my brain from exploding."

"Heads do not suddenly explode." Trust the guy with the death glare to have no sense of humor. "We should change our position before someone else comes." Heero had managed to rig the sling and shotgun so when he hoisted himself back into the tree it stayed more-or-less in position on his back.

The next few hours were spent sliding from tree to tree as quietly and efficiently as possible. We were less frantic now with a weapon and the hopeful thought that the hunters had spread out enough that our encountering one meant that none of the others were too close, although we still froze at any suspicious noises. We must have covered a few miles, and I was running on pure, stubborn refusal to be the slow one in the group and not much else when Heero sat down on a branch and said, "We can rest for now."

"Huh?" was my witty comeback. Hey, I said I was tired.

"No gunshots or suspicious noises for close to an hour now. I believe the boat may have left. The implication of the words of the man on the boat is that any survivors of a hunt are left on the island and hunted again the next time the boat comes. Relaxing our guard completely would be unwise, but I believe we do not need to run any longer."

"Oh good." I slumped against my current tree. It was a nice, smooth-barked one, not one of those piney trees where just leaning on it gets you poked everywhere. "I don't suppose either of you know how to find food in a place like this? Wilderness survival and all that?"

"Yes, actually. Foraging is covered in survival basics. It is still summer, so some fruits are in season, as are some edible flowering plants." Wufei was playing teacher again. That was okay right now, since as long as he was talking about food, I didn't mind the slightly patronizing tone of voice.

"Great. What's close that I can eat? I haven't had anything in about two days and I'm running a bit low on energy." That comment got me stared at. "What?"

"Nothing." Another speaking look. Joy. Wufei scanned the nearby area. "There's really nothing in this specific location and we need to find water. We should move."

I mentally groaned, but decided to suck it up. Water would be appreciated right about now. "Fair enough. I vote you pick a direction, 'cause I got no clue."

Heero snorted. "We passed a stream about an hour ago. Based on the topography in this area and the direction of that stream, there is probably water to the east of our current position."

"Ooookay. And east would be…?"

Rather than point, he just got up and started moving. "I believe we should continue in the trees for now. A water source would be the perfect place for an ambush if the enemy has not left yet."

Yay. More twigs to try not to catch my hair in. That little detail was a lot more annoying now that I wasn't completely panicked and running for my life anymore.

Apparently Heero's psychotic direction sense was accurate, because we ran into a stream after about half an hour of tree walking. We were getting better at that, because we were backtracking less and less. Surveying the area, Heero and Wufei flicked some odd hand signals at each other, and then Wufei slid out of his tree while Heero pulled out the gun. When the hunters missed their cue to jump out yelling "BOO!" Heero put the gun away and slid down too, and I followed.

The water was cleaner than a lot of what I'd had to drink in the past, and it was welcome after hours of attempting to travel unobtrusively through the woods. Wufei scouted a bit and found some berry bushes near the stream. Food made life much much better, even given situational problems.

"So, now what?" I asked when I was done munching blackberries. I was now really hoping neither of them would answer "split up." I was a streetrat; woodcraft was out of my area of expertise.

"Possibly we should discover if any of the other captives survived as we did," Wufei said meditatively. "We may stand a better chance of survival if more of us band together and fight back."

"Don't bother," a voice from the trees said.

We all immediately whipped around, Heero somehow managing to pull out the shotgun in the same movement and draw a bead on the speaker. A boy was crouched in the tree about twenty feet above us, balanced easily on one of the limbs. "You're the only ones left."

I blinked up at him. "Well, that sucks. You weren't on the boat with us. How long've you been here?"

I was getting "are you crazy?!" looks from Heero and Wufei again. Hey, what can I say? My instincts said trust this guy, and they hadn't gotten me killed yet.

Tree guy smirked. "Around a month. I'm not sure they even know I'm here anymore. I don't think they're keeping exact count of the kills, and none of them have managed to find me yet."

"Cool. How'd you manage that?"

"Trees. Same way you three got away."

I blinked. "How long have you been following us?" Heero growled.

"Not long, perhaps an hour."

Heero still had the shotgun up in position, and from the way Wufei was standing, I was pretty sure he knew some martial arts. I rolled my eyes. "Given that none of us are dead yet, I'm pretty sure this guy is okay. Can we put the gun down now?"

Heero glared at me for a minute and then lowered the gun. "If you have been on this island for a month, you know more than we do. Can you give us the details of this operation?"

"Some. But not here. Follow me."

And we were back to the trees. It was slightly annoying to think that this mode of travel had been, to some extent, my idea. It was getting to be a serious pain in the ass. It didn't help that tree guy was better at this than we were too, easily making jumps without handholds and walking across branches skinny enough to make me twitch. It took me a bit to realize we were shadowing the stream. I guess it made sense; water was always going to be a needed thing to have around. It also made it slightly easier once I'd figured that out, because then I could take small detours around really difficult jumps and crossovers.

Eventually we got where we were going. Wherever we were, I had to say it must make a good hiding spot, because boy, had it been a bitch to get to. From the ground some of what we'd climbed over would have been practically impassable. Even with the trees it had taken what seemed like forever, and I felt like I had a bush stuck in my braid and more scratches and welts than the time I'd fallen off a fence and into a prickly bush. At least I had long sleeves and long pants on. My clothes had more rips in them than before, but my arms and legs had been spared the worst.

The length of our little tree run had me really wishing for a watch again; I guessed it had been about an hour's worth of traveling, but since my time sense was only really reliable for small increments of time, who the hell knew for sure? Actually..."Hey Heero, how long'd it take us to get here?"

"One hour eight minutes. Why?"

"Just curious." And now slightly weirded out.

We were in some sort of grove of nice, branchy, smooth-barked trees that looked normal at first, but a second glance showed some branches had been twisted together and leaves added to make a sort of shelter in one area. Here, for the first time, tree guy flipped off his branch, swung around the ones below him, and landed lightly on the ground. I decided to screw graceful and just eeled down to a lower altitude before letting gravity take over and landing on my butt. Wufei and Heero slid down too, making less of a thud than I did, but definitely making more noise than our mysterious helper. Speaking of… "I'm Duo." I waved, decidedly not standing up. The ground was nice and comfortable right about now, and I wasn't leaving for at least a few more minutes. "These're Heero and Wufei." I pointed at each respectively.

"Trowa."

"So, how come you're here?"

"On the island or helping you?" He cocked his head to the side. With him out of the tree, I finally got a good look. It seemed to be odd hairstyle day, between my braid, Wufei's ponytail, Heero's need of a comb, and now this guy's long bangs. I'd've bet on him having been on the island long enough to really need a haircut except for the fact that only his bangs were that long; the rest of his hair was pretty short. Go figure.

"Uh…both, I guess."

He leaned against a tree. "I'm on the island because I was taken from the streets and brought here on a boat. I took to the trees to leave no trail for the hunters, and I managed to hide well enough that none have found me, then or since. I'm helping you because you three managed to survive in a similar manner to me, and you have teamed up. I believe we may work well together and perhaps find a way to escape the island."

"Um." I blinked and looked at Heero and Wufei questioningly. I believed the guy, I mean, he had obviously been living rough, but their status as police wasn't my secret to tell.

Fortunately, Wufei at least read my look correctly. Maybe the silent communication wasn't just a cop thing. "Escape may be slightly easier than you believe. Heero and I were sent here by the police force as undercover agents. Unfortunately, we were expecting slavers and not murderers so we have no way of contacting backup right now. However, if we acquire some kind of radio transmitter, we can call for police reinforcements." Heero looked slightly pissed at Wufei, but his glaring wasn't aimed at me, so I didn't care all that much. Actually, I was kind of relieved since now I had confirmation that Heero glared at everyone and it wasn't just me.

Trowa blinked and looked at me with a raised eyebrow. "Hey, all I did was pick the locks on the cuffs," I said. "Speaking of, how'd you get yours off?"

"I dislocated my thumbs to slip out of them."

Ow. That hurt just to think about. Silence reigned for a minute or so. "Okay. We have a goal: get off the island and/or find a radio. I vote we start later. I don't know about the rest of you, but all this tree climbing has wiped me out."

That got me a smirk, a glare, and a flat stare. I'm sure you can figure out which came from whom. "If you can pry yourself off the ground," Trowa said with wry humor, "there are some platforms in these trees that are slightly safer to sleep on. None of the animals here are truly dangerous, but some can be curious."

I pried myself off the ground. I had no intentions of waking up with something furry in my face. There were platforms, built by hooking fallen branches onto living ones and hooking them together to make a solid surface. It wasn't too uncomfortable with some dead leaves spread across it. Since it was still summer, it wasn't too cold, and being off the ground meant I had airflow both over and under me to keep it from being too hot. More comfortable than some of the places I'd slept in, and definitely quieter, even with the other three starting to discuss things below me. Any other problems were ignored in the face of tiredness; I crashed and was out almost immediately.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: I do not own.

A/N: I've got a few things to say. First and most relevant, I've got this entire thing edited now, and there are 13 chapters and an epilogue. I'm not going to post everything at once; I like to keep the anticipation high (or, alternately, I like making readers squirm; you can decide which). I'll post at least a chapter a week...but I will post faster if I get a lot of reviews telling me people are reading this and really really want the next chapter sooner. I've gotten lots of story alerts on this...and comparatively few reviews, which I have to say is slightly unhelpful. Obviously people like my writing (YAY!) but I don't know what you all like/dislike/think is fun. I'd like to know; I am writing another fic (much more slowly, but it is happening) so feedback is very very nice. Other things I wanted to say: probably felt I should apologize now before I forget for my pathetic attempts at cute romance. So sorry in advance. Also, as things start moving plot-wise, I have to say that generally any planning that goes down was originally meant to work. And then when I actually started writing it the strategy part of my brain decided it wouldn't work. So if it seems odd that over the next few chapters a bunch of stuff gets planned and then doesn't work/happen, that's why. Felt I should explain. Enjoy!

Chapter 5

I woke up later that afternoon with a strong need to use the bushes and a rumbling stomach. Looking around showed me an empty clearing. I couldn't tell if the leaves spread on some of the other platforms looked any more disordered or squished than before, so go figure on whether everyone else had already woken up or if I had been the only one napping. Since I crashed first before, I had no clue. I climbed down and took care of the bushes need, then started looking to see if I could figure out where everyone else had gone. I found nothing, and concluded they must have traveled via tree. A good idea, but it meant I could do bugger all to find them. With nothing else to do, I hauled my abused self back into the foliage and jumped-climbed my way towards the nearby stream so I could get some water and hopefully find something obviously edible, like more blackberries. I had success with the water, but I didn't find any plants that I knew for sure were edible, and I wasn't going to try anything I wasn't sure of. Back to the camp to wait. My life seemed to have turned into a strange reenactment of Tarzan. Whee.

Did I mention I don't sit still well? I was bored within five minutes of arriving back at the tree hotel, so I decided to take my hair out of its braid, pull out any twigs still stuck in it, and rebraid it as best as possible. It took longer than I thought. All the tree-climbing shenanigans had left enough twigs and little leaf bits in my hair to built several birds separate nests if they wanted them, and the foliage was stuck to my head well enough that if I didn't take time to work it out carefully it hurt like hell. At least having my hair in a braid had kept the worst of the tangles out. I had just about finished finger-combing my hair to relative neatness when rustling heralded the arrival of my new compatriots.

I looked up, continuing to work out the last snarls. "So, where'd you all go?"

Heero opened his mouth to answer, got a good look at me, and seemed to choke. And stare. My internal self was, expectedly, laughing its ass off. It was also cheering, which was less expected. I decided to figure out why later. Wufei and Trowa both did double takes but recovered faster than Heero did, so Wufei was the one to answer. "We went back to survey the beach to analyze the possibility of either swimming to another location or sneaking on board a boat. Neither seems feasible"

By now I was braiding my hair up again. "I know I crashed before the big discussion, so what do we know about this whacko outfit?"

Heero seemed to have gotten his voice back, and this time he answered. "This organization kidnaps street children, who are least likely to be missed. Possibly they also buy slaves. It would explain why there was interaction between foreign slavery organizations and this one." I finished my braid but stayed planted on the ground; it was more comfortable. "They are brought here on boats at irregular intervals and sent out as game for hunters who wish to hunt intelligent prey. Most children are killed immediately. A few survive a few days longer, but again, most die soon after. There is no communication equipment or man-made structures of any kind on this island. There is nowhere close enough to swim to. The only way on or off appears to be the boats that come."

"So, we need to hijack a boat? That does _not_ sound terribly realistic. We have four people, and I'm betting the hunters' boat always arrives with the huntees', so it's not like we can jump one and not deal with the other."

"Unfortunately, that is the conclusion we have come to as well. I believe the next time the boats arrive, we should hide ourselves and study them for possible weaknesses and openings," Wufei said.

I frowned. "Is there enough cover by the beach? The trees were definitely thinner there."

"There are more a little ways in," Trowa said softly. "The view will be a bit obstructed, but the safety improvement balances out the loss of vision."

I blinked as a couple of facts snapped together in my head. "Wait, you said the boats come at irregular intervals, right? And you want to plan to watch the next one? But we don't know when that is." _Which means one of them is probably going to say…_

"We will set a watch each day," Heero said. _Yep. Saw that coming._ "Groups of two are the best choice, and the watchers will have the gun. The boats always arrive at around dawn, so the first shift will start tomorrow morning."

"Right, then. Since I already got some sleep, I'll volunteer to be part of the first watch." That got a startled look out of Wufei and a slight eye widening from Heero. Did they seriously think someone could grow up on the streets and not be used to keeping odd hours? I'd had bolt holes before that I had to leave before dawn or, conversely, couldn't use until dawn. Odd schedules were normal for me.

"I will go with you, and Wufei will watch with Trowa." Now I was the one to blink; I'd kind of expected Heero and Wufei to stay together. "In this configuration, there will be a trained police officer in each group." Oh. That made sense.

"Great. Since that's decided, now what? It's only late afternoon. And do any of you know where something close by and edible is?"

I got blinked at for a few seconds while everyone processed the sudden change of subject. "I can show you where another berry bush is," Trowa said.

"Cool. Thanks."

Heero turned to Trowa, ignoring the sudden sidetrack I'd taken the conversation on. "If you have no objection, while we have some time I would like to add to the structures here some, and increase the camouflage if possible."

"I don't mind. What's done is what I could do working alone. Help would be appreciated."

So the next few hours were spent carefully constructing more tree shelters. Trowa showed Heero where to get downed wood that was still strong enough to use, taking me along a little ways so he could point out a raspberry bush, and then Heero spent most of his time hauling in branches, vines, and moss. No one could say he wasn't strong, even if the guy always talked like a machine.

Wufei had some experience making camouflage nets from leaves, underbrush, and those weird viney things, so he spent most of the time tying things together and then tying them to the trees.

I discovered I had a knack for eyeballing which of the branches Heero hauled in would fit together well enough to make a platform, so I did basic construction work on platforms and, after Trowa showed me how, some roof-ish things too from more branches and some net bits from Wufei.

Trowa was interesting; he'd pull the oddest balancing tricks to either put branches into places I couldn't safely get to or use more of the viney stuff to tie off the ends of platforms to standing trees and branches so they'd stay. I finally asked him how he'd learned to do all that, and his answer was he'd worked part-time with the circus before it left town. Weird.

Construction work was followed by dinner. Trowa knew where more and different edible things were, although apparently he'd had to use the trial-and-error method to figure out whether or not some of it was edible. Wigged me out; no way I'd have gone around eating things just to figure out if they wouldn't kill me. But either way, foraging got us some nuts, berries, and edible plants; practically a feast.

Afterwards I remembered a question I had. "Hey, Heero!"

He looked up.

"What time do you want to move out tomorrow morning to get to the beach? I need to know what time I should set my internal alarm for."

"The landing point is four hours hike away on a straight path if we move quickly." That close? We must have done more backtracking than I'd thought trying to get around earlier. Well, we had been tired, so our speed had by all rights been pathetic. "I want to be in position an hour before dawn."

"Five hours before dawn it is."

It was good thing I'd had a nap and was used to very little sleep, because I wasn't going to get more than five hours now.

I went to bunk down on one of the new platforms and surprisingly enough, Heero went for one of the others. I guess it wasn't that surprising, since he'd be up just as early, but the guy just gave off the impression of never needing to slow down or sleep. Firmly derailing that train of thought, which was harder than it should have been, I focused on trying to drift off. After a bit of uncomfortable fidgeting because of the unfamiliar noises, smells, and general atmosphere, I managed it.


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: I do not own.

A/N: I got bored, so you get another (rather short; sorry) chapter. I don't have much to say this time...although you can thank my beta for a good bit of this chapter; it got a lot of tweaking during the edit phase. To windwraith, your second suggestion about how Quatre could show up is very interesting, and it never occurred to me. I never much cared for his dad either. If I didn't have this thing written already, I might have taken that suggestion. If you're curious, Quatre shows up in the next chapter.

Please review, likes and dislikes. You were here. Something. Feedback is very nice. Enjoy.

Chapter 6

We watched the beach from one hour before dawn to two hours after. Nothing happened. I was bored. I'd actually spent more time watching Heero than the beach, although any time I caught myself at it I stopped.

Breakfast was foraged for on the trip back to our current home, and then we spent good chunk of time solidifying the construction from yesterday. The camouflage was improved to make the additions to the grove virtually undetectable unless you knew they were there, as opposed to the just hard-to-see impression from before.

The afternoon was spent exploring. The island was of no describable shape, unless you consider "random squiggly blob" a decent description. Most of it was flat and foresty, although there were some ridges and somewhat daunting slopes in the northeast section that were a serious pain to climb while only traveling via tree. We actually had to drop to the ground to haul ourselves up some of the rockier parts. The island was a few miles longer than it was wide. The beach where the boats landed was on the southernmost tip, and our little hideaway was a little under a mile northeast of the center.

More than once on our exploration trip we came across remains of other poor souls who had been less than lucky in their attempts at eluding pursuit. After the first body, or what was left of it, I made a point of not looking too hard; Trowa may have said the animals weren't dangerous, but obviously some of the scavengers were large and working overtime. I'd seen my share of dead bodies previously, but these were just sad. And a bit frightening; one misstep and that could become me. Almost was me. I refused to think too hard about that.

We covered the bodies as best as possible with leaves; actual graves would be obvious and let unfriendlies know that we were alive and in the area, and so were out of the question. Given the number of trees on the island, however, leaves were fairly innocuous even if they didn't make the best of covering materials; one good breeze and the cover would scatter. Even if they were makeshift, the burials made me, at least, feel better. It felt like we were acknowledging the dead and their humanity, as opposed to the bastards who gunned them down like animals. I'm pretty sure everyone else felt the same way. I was fairly certain Trowa'd been covering any bodies he'd found during his stint alone on the island, Heero never protested the lost time, and I caught Wufei bowing his head in prayer once when he thought no one was looking.

By the end of the day I was dead-dog-tired again and somewhat emotionally wrung out. I was glad Wufei and Trowa had the next morning's watch, and I took the opportunity to sleep for a very long time.

Day two of plan "wait for the boat" was just as boring as day one. I finally asked Wufei to show me how to use the gun in case of emergency, just to eat some time. Because of limited ammunition I couldn't actually fire the thing, but I got the theory down pat. Wufei offered to show Trowa too, but Trowa turned him down. Then he showed us the collection of sharp and throwable rocks he'd picked up. Whatever floats his boat, I guess. Damn unintended puns.

The afternoon was warm enough that I elected to wash my clothes and get as clean as possible. I was used to bathing in cold water, so the stream wasn't that bad and feeling clean was nice. I waited until my hair was at least somewhat dry before rebraiding it and heading back to base. Apparently my "get clean" idea was deemed a good plan, so for the next few hours we played musical chairs as to who was in the camp and who was not. I was muchly amused when Wufei came back cursing about cold water.

Then I was parked on a platform in a tree and bored again. Everyone was back from using the stream and there was enough of time left before dark that I decided it was worth the effort to try and start a conversation. "Hey Heero, Wufei, how'd you two end up drawing the short straw for this?" I gestured to the general surroundings. "Was age the deciding factor at police HQ, or did you lose at rock-paper-scissors or something?"

Wufei snorted. "Police officers do not play rock-paper-scissors to decide assignments, Duo. Assignments are given based on skill sets"

"Still waiting for an actual answer, y'know."

Heero spoke up this time. "Age was the deciding factor, although both of us were deemed physically capable of handling any situation that would potentially arise before anything was officially decided. The kidnappers do not take adults."

"So why are you working with the police when you should be, what, in high school? I never did figure the exact ages for those things…"

"High school is correct. I was trained from a young age with the intention that I would join the force."

I blinked. I was honestly somewhat surprised I was even getting answers at all. "Is that even legal?"

"It is not illegal." Heero half shrugged.

Oh-kay…that was just…odd. "What about you, Wufei?"

He rolled his eyes; made me wonder if he got this question a lot. Actually, on second thought, he probably got asked any time he wasn't working undercover. Teenage cops, not so common. "Basically the same thing, only in a different city. Heero and I have not been partners for terribly long; I was pulled in last month to help with another case and asked to stay to help with this one. Why were you on the streets?"

Whoa, massive question turn around. Well, I had asked first. This time I sort of shrugged. "When I got grabbed? Honestly, to steal some food. Never actually made it, though. Living on the streets, period? No idea. I've been on them as long as I can remember. I can pretty much guarantee that either I was abandoned or my parents died, but I couldn't tell you which." I paused to see if anyone would ask something else, but no one did. I'm pretty sure I'd managed to raise the awkward in the area by a few points all on my own. I felt special. "Trowa? How 'bout you?"

He shrugged. Apparently, shrugging is contagious. "I was simply taken while walking back to my hideout at the end of the day. I've been on the streets as long as I can remember as well. However, my earliest memories are of the aftermath of some sort of accident, so I'm fairly certain my family is dead."

I bonked my head backwards against a tree. "Well, aren't we a happy bunch. Two street kids and two police officers born and raised, stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere and the only way off is to steal a boat from a bunch of adults with weapons. Uh, thinking about that, do any of you know how to drive a boat? 'Cause I sure don't."

"Yes." And Heero gives a one word answer. I was sort of coming to expect that.

"Oh good. It would suck if we got a boat and couldn't use it."

"Even if we are not able to use the boat for transportation, we should be able to use the communications equipment to call for help. In a complete emergency, the best course of action may be to steal a radio from one of the boats and use it to call for help from somewhere on the island," Wufei said. "Getting off the island would be preferable, however. There really is no way to ensure that any radio we find will be compatible with a frequency the police will be able to pick up. It would be a gamble."

"But multiple options are always good. Got any other ideas?"

The rest of the evening involved bouncing more and more ridiculous plans. My favorite suggestion involved standing on the highest point on the island and tapping out a message in Morse code with coconut halves. Of course, Trowa then pointed out that there were no coconuts on the island, and Wufei went off on some tangent about sound waves and distance traveled and friction that I didn't understand, but it was fun to watch him get flustered. Heero looked amused. After that I spent a lot of time making humorous cracks on all the completely crazy plans that got brought up until I got Trowa to laugh, Wufei to chuckle, and Heero to smirk. I felt accomplished.


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: I do not own.

A/N: So someone finally called me on the 'using trees as method of sneaking' trick. Honestly, no, it would not hold up to intense scrutiny. But because the hunters are chucking large groups of kids onto the island and not keeping direct track of all of them (they aren't paying attention to which kids get killed; say one survived off a boatload and then died in the next round but a different kid survived from the second boatload, no one would know the difference because the number of kids didn't change), and since there are no obvious trails leading to the trees, no one is looking up. The one hunter that did follow the trail to begin with got killed earlier. That's basically my thought process, or at least as much of it as I can explain (I only about half think in words). And if anyone is curious, I'm pretty sure you can blame Mercedes Lackey for the basis of the tree plot bunny. Enjoy.

Chapter 7

Day three of waiting for the boat saw a slight collapse of the original plan. Apparently I wasn't the only one who was dead bored and getting frustrated with sitting around waiting for news, and Trowa and Wufei elected to come with us to beach watch.

It figures that that was also the day the boats came back.

Heero spotted some sort of speck on the horizon first, and pretty soon they were close enough that we knew for sure both boats were heading for the island we were on. We were well hidden in our trees, thanks to some judicious camouflage nets and the choice of some trees that were pretty much impossible to access from the ground, so we should be safe. And thinking that's about when I realized that we had planned just to watch the boats this time. Which meant watching while a bunch of kids were thrown out to run for their lives.

_Oh shit_. I felt sick as I watched the boats get closer and finally stop. "Guys…is there anything we can do to help them?" I kept my voice basically steady, and I didn't have to explain beyond that. Our very limited view of the beach had enough of a gap to see the chained group being led onto the deck of the left boat.

"No." Heero's voice was completely flat, and he never looked away from what we could see of the beach. "We can't protect that many untrained civilians, and we are not ready to chance an attack on the boats yet."

_Fuck it._ I stopped looking and turned my face to the tree trunk, breathing slowly and deeply to keep at least moderately calm. If I looked, I would do something stupid. If it were just me, I might have gone ahead and done something dumb like jump out and play distraction in the hopes that some kids would get away, but anything I did now would affect my friends, and I wouldn't risk them. I had about half a second to wonder when "allies" had morphed into "friends" before splashing warned me that our fellow innocent kidnappees had been thrown off the boat.

The sound of panicked running was louder than it should have been and I tried futilely to turn my thoughts and imagination off, shoving my forehead into the tree so hard I knew I'd have marks on it later.

The general thudding, crashing sounds were drowned about two and a half minutes later by a closer set of crashing noises. This time I had to look, and I shifted enough to watch as a young blond boy struggled between the trees below us, attempting to get as far from the beach as possible. I shot a pleading look towards Heero, Wufei, and Trowa. Heero had his eyes glued to the beach, steadfastly ignoring everything else, and Wufei was glancing between the beach and the boy. Trowa was watching the blond head, and caught my glance out of the corner of his eye. He gave me a helpless look. I flicked my eyes at the blond, then at the trees we were sitting in, silently pleading to rescue this one at least, since he was here, even though we couldn't save the rest of them.

By now Wufei had caught the silent exchange, and he looked torn. Finally Heero turned away from the beach, looked straight at me, and nodded. That was all I needed. "Hey!" I called. The blond froze and his gaze shot up to us. He un-startled himself fairly quickly and immediately awkwardly scrambled up the tree right next to him, which luckily for him was easily climbable. I swung my way over and picked the locks on his cuffs so he could move freely.

Heero shifted into a crouch on his branch and hauled his camo net up so he could carry it. "We can't stay here. Keep up. And be quiet." He shot a glare at the blond and then started moving in a direction parallel to the beach. We grabbed our nets and followed as carefully as possible given the speed Heero was setting. When I glanced back once, Trowa was helping the boy move, and since it seemed to be working I went back to concentrating on not falling out of the trees myself.

I'd lost track of time again when Heero suddenly stopped and shifted himself and some branches and his net to provide as much cover as possible. The rest of us quickly copied him, and a glance at the beach made me realize that Heero had stopped because he wanted to watch the hunters get off their boat. I made an effort to consciously slow my breathing again before I started hyperventilating. I just couldn't shake the feeling that we were treed prey, and I had to keep reminding myself that Heero had the shotgun and we weren't completely helpless. That helped.

Over on the hunter's boat, a ramp had been lowered to reach the ground and a group of men with various kinds of guns and other weapons were nonchalantly walking down onto the beach. My adrenaline decided that now was a good time to either fight or start running like hell; I told it to shut the fuck up. By some unspoken agreement, the hunters on the beach split up, most following various sets tracks in the sand, although a few simply headed straight into the woods.

Even after all the hunters had vanished into the woods we stayed put in our little surveillance position, and our next few hours were tense and extremely uncomfortable. Heero had managed to pick a place in the forest where none of the kidnapped kids had passed, so none of the tracking hunters went by us, and luck was with us since none of the ones who hadn't bothered with tracks picked our direction to walk in either. We, as a group, were at least moderately safe. But the sounds from the rest of the forest kept drifting back to us, full of gunshots and occasional screams. I was impressed with the new kid's ability to stay calm and quiet under pressure; this was killing me, and I'd already been through it once. Although I'd been too busy running for my life to pay too much attention to the sounds of the others dying then.

I winced every time I heard a gun go off, and I winced again when I realized that not all the hunters had had guns; some had held nasty-looking knives as well. I wasn't sure what was worse, hearing the deaths of others, or knowing someone was dying and that I couldn't tell it was happening at all. At least with the gunshots I could say a silent prayer for whoever got shot.

Eventually hunters started to trickle back onto the beach. We couldn't hear them and were too far back to have a great view of their gestures either, but from the body language of the ones I could see I could tell some of them were boasting. One smug bastard walked out of the treeline with a fist in the air and three fingers raised. That one was fucking obvious, and I wanted to take the shotgun and go blow that guy's brains out. Fortunately, Heero had the gun, which stopped me from doing anything stupid.

Eventually all the hunters were back, and three fingers guy had apparently won this round, because everyone else was giving him pats on the back and other congratulations. I gritted my teeth and concentrated on the thought of him with a hole in his head. I had a disturbing amount of images to pull from to imagine that, thanks to woods exploring the past few days.

If glaring and intent could kill, by the time the hunters got back on their boat, none of them would have been left. That boat slid back first, turning slowly around before moving off in a right diagonal direction. The second boat moved after it a minute or so later. It was riding higher in the water and so moved out slightly more easily than the other. I tried not to think about why.

When the boats were farther away, I turned to my right to look at Heero. "Can we go back now?" There was more of a pleading not in my voice than I wanted to admit to.

"Yes."

We were rather subdued as we shook out limbs that had fallen asleep from prolonged lack of movement and then tree walked our way back to our little hideout. When we arrived I immediately dropped to the ground, jammed my back against a tree, and hauled my knees up to my chest. I needed the solidity right then. "I can't do that again. If you want to watch some more, fine, but I can't just sit and do nothing. I'll go crazy."

I looked up at our little band of survivors. Heero was expressionless, but his eyes were practically blazing. Wufei was looking somewhat murderous. Trowa had a flat look on his face, and the blond we'd picked up was looking somewhat shellshocked. I don't want to know what I looked like.

Seeing the blond again, I forcibly derailed my current train of thought and focused on him; I could have my nice mental breakdown later, thank you. I uncurled and hauled myself off the ground. "I'm Duo. What's your name?"

He blinked as thought processes came back online. "Quatre."

My introduction caused a couple of guilty looks as everyone realized none of us had even introduced ourselves. No one else caught the conversation ball, so I continued. "This's Trowa, Heero, and Wufei."

I could see the gears in Heero's head turning. "Quatre Winner?" he asked abruptly.

Quatre's eyes widened a bit. "Yes."

"Care to share?" I drawled. Sarcasm to beat mental breakdowns. Let's hear it for sarcasm.

"The heir to Winner Enterprises. Kidnapped eight days ago with a ransom demand given a day later. The exchange was meant to take place yesterday," Heero rattled off.

"Apparently it never happened," Wufei muttered loudly enough to be audible. "We now have confirmation that whoever is running this operation is paying for additional people as well as grabbing them off the streets."

"Heero and Wufei are cops," I said to de-confuse the confused-looking Quatre. "Their undercover job didn't go as planned."

"Ah. Um…does that mean we have a chance of getting out of here alive?"

"Hopefully. That's why we were watching the boats come in, to come up with a plan." And Trowa finally joined the discussion. I was beginning to think he had lost his voice permanently.

Quatre finally looked around at the grove and his eyes widened. "Did you four build this?"

"Trowa did most of it," I answered as I mentally smirked. I was pretty sure Trowa was blushing. This was too much fun. "We helped add on when we got here three days ago."

Quatre turned to Trowa looking distressed. "You were here by yourself?" Behind him, Wufei rolled his eyes. I muffled a snicker.

"Only for a month," Trowa answered and shrugged. "I got by."

"We should format a plan now." Leave it to Heero to break up the banter. Although I noticed he only stopped us after we were all a bit more relaxed and feeling better about the situation. Maybe supercop was human after all.

Heero knelt down to draw in the dirt. "The two boats were about 500 yards apart. There were fifteen captives let off the first boat. There were ten in our group. Trowa, how many were in yours?"

"I wasn't counting. Maybe fifteen? More than ten."

Heero nodded. "Besides the captives, there were four armed guards, a supervisor, and at least one other person steering the boat. The hunters boat carried twelve men with various arms, as well as at least one other person to steer that boat. Tree cover does not extend all the way to the boats. The closest it gets is 100 yards. We know that the number of captives changes with each voyage. The number of hunters may vary as well. The boats left by sailing to the northwest. The mainland is probably in that direction."

Heero sat back to look at his drawings. "Stealing a boat and sailing it back to the mainland is too impractical given the circumstances. All we really need is a communications device in order to call for help."

Quatre crouched down next to Heero. "The trees don't go all the way to the boats, but there are some rocks over here." He drew a jagged line to the far side of the hunter's boat. "It would be possible for someone to hide in the rocks and swim to the nearer boat and board. Risky, but possible. When is the next boat going to arrive?"

"Odd intervals," Trowa answered. "We can't be sure."

"The ideal situation would be to steal a communication device without anyone noticing, so the police can trap the hunters. However, the arrival of the boats means more deaths. If help is on the way, it may be possible to protect at least some of the victims. That, however, has the potential to bring us to the notice of the hunters, posing a safety risk."

I felt slightly blindsided by the short blond taking charge since he looked like such an innocent, especially when compared to our two cops, but I decided to go with it since everyone else seemed to feel his ideas made sense. _When in Rome…and where the hell did that stupid quote come from anyway? Ah, never mind._ "If possible, I vote for saving people. Listening to them die when I know we _can't_ do anything is bad enough; if we can help, I vote we do it."

"It is a risk, but one I believe is worth taking," Wufei acknowledged. Trowa nodded.

Heero stared at the dirt for a minute. "Agreed." He looked up. "We need to make a concrete plan, and anticipate as many problems as possible to minimize the risk."

I didn't end up regretting my vote, but I really really didn't like the plan we came up with.


	8. Chapter 8

Disclaimer: I don't own them.

A/N: Does anyone read these? Anyway, to the person who brought up Quatre's empathy...I'm trying to follow canon mostly, and I have to say I never saw much hard evidence in the anime for Quatre being sensitive. So I'm leaving it alone, pretty much. *shrugs* On another note, I want to share the importance of reading author notes with everyone (although I'm preaching to the choir here, since this is an AN...): I got a review for Colors where someone declared they like the fic but were doubtful about the colors themselves. I about laughed my ass off; obvious, there was a lack of reading of the part where I said those were the colors I see. :) But back to this fic, question to readers: what do you think about the chapter length? Should I make a point of trying to make them longer in my next fic, or just let them fall as is the way I did here? Reviews make me post faster. Beware of sap. Enjoy.

Chapter 8

The plan was part simplistic, straightforward sneak tactics and part crazy, hopefully unanticipatable random ideas we'd all come up with.

Well, the crazy part was mostly me and Trowa. He could be scarily bloodthirsty when he wanted to be. Between us we designed some nasty rope tricks and hidden pitfalls. The idea was to get as many hunters as possible incapacitated and off our trail so we could grab the, as Heero termed them, "civilians" and get them somewhere safe via tree highway.

Problems started popping up around this time. We'd be showing our hand by advertising the fact the A) we were here and B) we were fighting back. Basically, we were about to paint massive targets on all of our chests. And backs, and heads, and extremities. There'd also be all the problems associated with getting a group of terrified and somewhat incapacitated people out of sight quickly, quietly, and without leaving a trail. Which was going to be virtually impossible; that many people through the trees was going to leave at least an indication that that's what we'd used to get around.

That was all completely ignoring the problem of protecting the people we'd rescue long enough for help to actually arrive. The plan for that was something along the lines of having the five of us play sniper and/or distraction to keep the hunters away from our home base, which was where we intended to stash the intended victims. About in here I made a joke about literally painting targets on our chests so we matched the situation. Heero looked like he was considering it.

Even with all the crazy, seat-of-the-pants, cat-and-mouse, try-not-to-get-shot stuff we had planned, my main role is what I disliked the most: I got nominated to sneak on the boat and steal a radio. I do _not_ swim well; doggy paddling is about the extent of my abilities. Unfortunately for me, swimming ability was shoved backseat to sneaking ability. Heero and Wufei were cops, and although they were trained to work undercover, they couldn't sneak to save their lives. And Trowa, while agile and quiet, could not pick a lock or a pocket if required. Quatre wasn't even in the running, although he had quickly taken over the strategy-making part of the operation.

I attempted to protest my role on the bad swimmer grounds and the grounds that all the people we were trying to rescue would be cuffed and I was the only one who could pick the locks. Quatre's answer to that was to smile sweetly and assign me to teach Heero to pick locks and Heero to teach me to swim better. My sudden need to smack my brain into submission after it supplied me with images of Heero wet and partially unclothed stalled any response long enough for the motion to get passed by both Trowa and Wufei.

I mentally swore that I'd get the blond back for that.

We still had a few hours of daylight left, and we spent them starting our trap construction, weaving several vine nets and sharpening sticks with the daggers Heero and Wufei had had stashed in their boots. We all pretty much crashed after that due to exhaustion.

We woke early and started the day off by setting up the traps we'd made the previous night in any easily traveled paths in the woods, and then started making as many new traps as we could and setting those up as well. With two recent arrivals, it was unlikely that the next boat would arrive tomorrow, and we'd already said fuck it about the boat arriving today (it hadn't, so it all worked out), but it was possible, so we worked as quickly and efficiently as we could.

In the early afternoon, Heero pulled me over for lockpicking and swimming lessons. While setting traps closer to the beach we'd searched around a bit, and after several minutes of cursing and attempting to triangulate, managed to find the cuffs I'd gotten off Quatre the previous day. We parked on the ground near the beach with me facing Heero, and I handed him the cuffs and a thin bit of wire I pulled out of my braid. "Try to unlock them."

He stuck the wire in the lock mechanism and fiddled with it. I could tell by looking that he had the wrong angle. "Try to feel the inside of the lock mechanism and use the wire to move it around."

Five minutes later Heero was massively frustrated and I was having trouble hiding my smirk. He was doing better than he had been, but wasn't anywhere close to getting the thing unlocked. Since we were on a time schedule, I finally moved from my current position to one behind him and reached around so my hands were over his. He froze. I chose to ignore it. "You're jamming it too hard. Try like this." I moved his hand gently, using the pick to push the tumblers into position so the lock popped open. "Did you feel how that happened?"

"…Yes." He stared intently at the lock.

I forced myself to let go and slide back around to the front. "Okay, so now do it yourself."

I thought he might have been blushing and I firmly told my cheering brain to not get its hopes up.

Heero kept his eyes down as he relocked the cuffs and then twiddled with the lock; he was going about it much better this time, trying to recreate what I'd just done. About five minutes later, he got it and looked over at me with a completely startled look on his face when the lock popped open. "Great!" I grinned at him. "Now keep doing it until you can do it in under a minute."

Half an hour later, Heero had his lockpicking down to thirty seconds for this particular lock, which I labeled as good as it was going to get. Any other lock and he'd still be pretty clueless, but I felt somewhat accomplished since I'd just taught a police officer the basics of breaking and entering.

Next trick was swimming. Since neither of us had extra clothing to spare, we pulled off our shirts (and I pulled all the lockpicks out of my hair) and left them on the beach before getting in the water which, by the way, was damned _cold_ even though it was still summer. I decided the cold was a good thing; it was distracting my brain at least somewhat from contemplating the fact that Heero was no longer completely dressed. I did the mental equivalent of refusing to look at that thought and focused on not swallowing water.

What? I said I didn't swim well.

Heero very quickly corrected my form and started me swimming back and forth between two rocks until I got the hang of the breaststroke. It was easier than I thought it would be. I probably shouldn't have been so surprised; I'm generally a coordinated person, so my main problem with learning to swim was lack of opportunity to practice. It's not like a street rat can get a pass to the local gym to use the pool, and even the public pools in the area required some sort of membership or payment to get in. Although I occasionally did sneak into the locker rooms after hours to use the showers; the security guards spent most of their time watching the pool itself, so as long as I stayed quiet I got a chance to get clean.

Eventually Heero declared I was moving well enough and quietly enough to call it quits. While we were in the water, we took the opportunity to check out the rocks I'd be hiding in. I needed a place where I'd be secure for an unknown length of time, where "secure" would be read as out of sight, somewhat safe, easy to move from in either the direction of a boat or, in case of an epic "oh shit" emergency, the beach, and comfortable enough to sit in that I wouldn't cramp up and be completely useless by the time I needed to move.

It was a good thing there were lots of rocks. It took some hunting, but I finally found an overhang with an almost bench under it where I could sit with my feet in the water and be out of sight. Mobility wasn't great, but it also wasn't horrible. If needed, I could play fiddler crab and scramble my way over the rocks to the beach. If everything went according to plan, I could slide into the water and swim to where the boat should be.

I wasn't sure if I was glad that we'd found a good spot or not. I was not looking forward to sneaking onto a boat that usually held people who would like to kill me. Although in the end I don't think it would have mattered; I'd have gone with a passable spot if it got me off this damn island. Hence why I'd agreed to do my "I'm a target! Hit me!" part of this plan even though I didn't like it.

Heero and I hauled ourselves out of the water, and I at least felt massively ungainly until I got used to the weight difference in being on land. I was wet and tired, so I plonked myself down flat next to my shirt and attempted to project an "I am not going to move for at least five minutes" vibe. Apparently it worked, because Heero plonked down next to me.

"That cloud looks like a bunny." I pointed.

I heard a snort. "It's a shapeless mass of white. It looks like whatever you want it to look like."

"Yup." I nodded as well as I could lying down. "And I like bunnies. What do you want it to look like?"

This time I got a confused silence. Not that silence can be confused, my mind rambled, since it has no feelings, but Heero sure looks confused, so the silence is confused by default. I told my brain to shut up. "I don't know. It's a cloud."

"Ah, so you like clouds." I attempted to sound wise.

This time I got an amused snort. I called that a win.

"HEY! Are you two dry enough to get over here and help now?" And Wufei was unamused. At least I'd gotten my five minutes.

Sitting up made me realize that lying down on sand while wet was not the greatest of ideas. I made a face and started brushing sand off the back of my arms while I stood. I was trying to figure out how to bend my arms to reach the rest of my back when Heero interrupted. "Let me."

"Okay." I managed to keep my voice from cracking but I knew damn well I was blushing. At least I was facing away from Heero. He gently brushed the rest of the sand off my back, and got as much off my braid as possible. His hands were warm and I could feel the calluses on them. I concentrated on keeping my brain off the track it wanted to take.

"Turn around so I can get yours," I said when he finished. I carefully brushed off what sand Heero hadn't managed to get on his own, firmly derailing any thoughts before they got started. I was somewhat glad to see Heero was blushing too when he turned back around, and by unspoken agreement neither of us mentioned it.

We jogged up the beach before we got yelled at again and went back to trapping the parts of the forest we thought the hunters were most likely to walk through. We got a lot the easily walkable parts as well a good chunk of the area from the beach to our hideout. We also trapped random bits around the island too, just to keep the hunters on their toes as well as make it less obvious where our base was.

That day we got a good half of what we had planned done. This made getting back to base entertaining, but we needed the practice remembering, spotting, and avoiding the nasty bits anyway since we'd be doing it lots soon, and doing some of it while hauling clueless people along with us. Joy fun. I made a detour to the stream to get the remaining sand and salt out of both my hair and my clothes. I caught Heero watching while I brushed my hair out, and I noticed he didn't leave to find the stream until after I'd braided it again. I was beginning to wonder what the odds of me getting a date were if we all survived this.

Dinner was more of the findable fruit and vegetables we'd been living on since none of us wanted to chance a fire. Since Quatre was less used to manual labor than the rest of us, he actually started nodding off while eating and Trowa had to help him up to one of the platforms before he ended up sleeping in the dirt. It was kind of cute. The rest of us finished eating and then crashed too.

Day two strongly resembled day one, with no boat and trap setting being the order of the day. I did get to spend the first part of it cold and wet since from now on I'd be waiting in the water. I discovered then that the original place I'd worked out to wait for the hunters to get off the boat was underwater in the morning. I found a different spot where I could sit, but the cover wasn't quite as good because there was no overhang this time. It was, however, the best I could find; hopefully bad dawn lighting and inattentive hunters would be on my side and help keep me from imminent death when the plan actually went down.

Also on the annoying scale, this time my shirt got soaked too, because when the shit finally hit the fan I was not going to have time to put it back on after stealing a radio. Wet clothes suck.

While I was in the water, Heero made me practice swimming. I hauled him in with me, because damned if I was going to be cold and wet alone. Plus this way I got him to take his shirt off again, since he didn't have any reason to leave his on.

I made him practice lockpicking again when we got out. While trapping the front of the woods yesterday, Trowa had found the cuffs I'd got off myself, Heero, and Wufei, so this time Heero got to practice on multiple pairs of cuffs. Luckily for him they all had identical cheap locks. Mostly he just needed to keep in practice to keep his speed up.

The biggest difference the second day was we finished all our preplanned mischief. Of course we didn't stop. We simply came up with more tricks. As a group we managed to design and pull off some moveable rope-based, easily-tied-or-hooked-to-a-branch, move-the-wrong-branch-and-get-hit-in-the-face-with-a-net-or-something-pointy traps, so we could trap our backtrail quickly if we needed to. That made all of us feel better, since leaving openings so we could get to base meant that someone else could follow them too. Heero also came up with the idea of removing some of the brush from the rocky area so the hill was unclimbable in spots.

I will admit that if I blocked out the idea of the danger we were in, I was having fun. This kind of creativity and construction work was what I was good at. I like handcrafty, fiddly stuff and I'd had plenty of practice with camouflage on the streets and fixing things in the junkyard.

I was also vindictively glad to be doing some damage back to the bastards who had started this. As a side effect of trapping the woods, we'd come across more remains. Since we weren't concealing ourselves as much anymore, we started burying whatever we found. A lot of it wasn't pretty, although it bothered me a lot less now that we were able to really give the kids a proper burial. Quatre ended up crying against Trowa's shoulder a few times while Wufei, Heero, and I took care of the body.

By the end of the day we were all dead tired again. I was moderately glad now of all the tree travel I'd been doing since I'd gotten on the island; it had strengthened my upper body enough that traveling miles around the island and setting traps wasn't completely wiping me out. We turned in somewhat early so we'd be rested for the next day.


	9. Chapter 9

Disclaimer: I don't own them.

A/N: Okay, I freely admit that the beginning of this chapter exists because I was running out of ways to kill time...and I got bored. -_-; Anyway, ignoring that, welcome to some action. This chapter is about when I first had one of those 'oh wait, the plan I worked out won't necessarily work in practice...hmm...' moments. It kept things interesting. Anyway, enjoy! Reviews are appreciated and make me update faster.

Chapter 9

Day three, no boat. As much as I was enjoying the chance to swim with Heero, I was getting slightly annoyed. That was two days now where I'd spent my morning cold and wet, and it's not like I had dry clothes to change into, and drying out takes forever in the morning.

We spent some time making sure the camouflage on our traps was solid, and making sure none had been dislodged by animals or freak falling branches or something. Then we hauled a medium-sized stockpile of food back to base in case we couldn't get near anything edible or wound up in the equivalent of a forest siege. And man was that a weird mental image…

That took up the morning, but by afternoon we were bored. We went back to home base so we'd have no chance of accidentally setting off a trap, which would be bad since nearly all of them were deadly.

I was contemplating the wisdom of attempting to climb higher than was safe in the tree I was in when Wufei finally seemed to get fed up and dropped to the ground. He started doing some sort of martial arts routine, with kicks, punches, and blocks built in. I looked over at Heero, who had apparently given in to boredom as well and was doing pushups on his platform.

It took some effort to drag my eyes off Heero, but I went back to watching Wufei. I made a point of cataloguing every point in which I could take him down if we were fighting. At about point ten I decided official martial arts and street fighting did not agree well. Of course, to make a couple of those hits I'd probably have to take some myself. But that's what you get in a street fight, do what it takes to win and survive.

What the heck, I was bored.

I slid from my platform to some lower branches and to the ground. "Hey, Wufei, want a partner?"

He blinked at me. "There is no way you are combat trained."

"Officially, no. But I'm pretty good at making things up as I go. I've survived this long, y'know."

"All right. If nothing else, perhaps you'll learn a few moves." Read as: Wufei's bored too.

It was worth the somewhat derogatory acceptance to see his face the first time I ducked in behind a punch, grabbed his shoulder and waist in a definitely non-kosher hold, and dumped him on his ass. Like I said, creativity.

Of course, he got me back by doing some sort of leg sweep that knocked me down next to him.

We rolled away from each other and started circling. I was pretty sure we had an audience by then, but I wasn't going to look away to check. If I did I'd most likely find myself on my butt on the ground again. I slid in with a punch to the side, which Wufei promptly blocked. I dodged his return punch only to get caught by a low kick to the back of my knees. I went with the momentum, falling backwards and tucking into a ball. When I hit the ground I shot a leg out, forcing Wufei to hop back and giving me time to get up again.

We kept going for a good fifteen minutes. Some time in there Wufei found my weak point and proceeded to use it for the rest of the match. Fighting on the streets, you do a lot of punching because given the chance, it's a lot better if you can run like hell and get away. So I'm not really used to either using or dealing with a lot of kicks. I'm not terribly good at blocking them. I got lots of practice now. Bastard.

Over the course of the match, neither of us did any real damage or managed to pull a trick that actually ended the fight, so eventually when I was hot and sweaty and I landed on my ass for the umpteenth time, I just stayed down. "Truce?" I shoved my sweat-soaked bangs out of my face.

"Truce," Wufei echoed. He took a few steps back until he could lean against a tree. Nice to know I'd managed to make him work too.

I flopped down completely flat on the ground. "Man, I needed that. Let's hear it for working off tension."

"You're not a bad opponent, Duo," Wufei admitted from over by his tree.

"Nice to hear. You're pretty good yourself." I waved in his general direction.

I blinked as Heero managed to appear leaning over me. "Your form is awful."

"But it works!"

"It's still awful." I think he was smirking.

I stuck my tongue out at him. Somewhere off to my right, Quatre burst out laughing.

We spent what was left of the afternoon and the evening generally having fun. Heero showed me some martial arts with a better form, and I taught him a few useful tricks that were not legal in any official fight. I never managed to get the better of him while we were sort-of-sparring, but with all the grappling going on I had plenty of opportunity to have my hands all over Heero and his hands all over me, so count me as a happy camper. Quatre surprised us all by knowing some self defense and dumping Wufei on his ass once. Trowa did some acrobatic tricks and juggled a bit. I attempted to juggle and gave up before I hit myself in the head with a rock.

After dinner it got kind of quiet because we were all trying not to think about tomorrow and what could possibly happen. Since the suspense broke the fun mood, we all pretty much decided to turn in early. Plus we'd have to be up at an unholy hour of the morning anyway.

Day four: boat.

Well, boats, since there were two of them. And maybe I should call them ships since they were pretty big…I mentally smacked myself to stop babbling. I crouched lower against my rock, making sure I was out of easy sight of any curious people on the deck.

I had a long wait between the time I spotted the boats and the time they actually reached the shore. Big, they were. Fast, not expecially. I tried not to fidget, but the suspense was killing me. I was about to sneak onto a boat. An occupied boat. With people who were trying to kill me. Who had weapons while I was unarmed. Was I insane? I stuffed my panic into the back of my head and ignored it. Now was definitely not the time.

The boats finally slid into place, and the captives on the far boat were led out on deck. I couldn't tell how many there were. I had an awkward angle for the view of that boat, and I was actually further from it than I would have been if I were in the tree line, but the strange acoustics on the water made it so I could hear bits and pieces of the conversation on the boat. It wasn't terribly useful; about all it told me was that the speech we'd gotten at the beginning was standard. The terrified yells as the captives were tossed out of the boat made me wince and hope like hell that Heero, Wufei, Quatre, and Trowa could get them all to safety.

The five minute break seemed like it would never end. I couldn't get on the boat until the hunters got off, but damn I hated waiting. I wanted to be out of there ASAP, with a radio so we could all get off the island ASAP, and get these people thrown in jail ASAP, and my mind was rambling at me again, this time with acronyms. Damn mind.

Finally the ramp went down and the hunters trooped off their boat. I slid into the water and kept one eye on them as they headed for the trees; this time, there were fourteen hunters, and a few made straight for the trees while the others aimed for tracks. As soon as I was sure they were all occupied, I started swimming quietly for the boat.

My back was crawling, and I felt like I had a great, big target painted on it and a sign saying "Shoot here to bag a street rat!" I heard startled and panicked yells from the forest and grinned somewhat maniacally. Someone had found a trap. I hoped none of them made it back out of the forest alive.

I had a bad realization and froze for a second as I reached the boat; if they decided the forest was too dangerous, they might come back. The prey was gone, hopefully vanished if we'd done our job right. My timeline before I would be in massive trouble was both unknown and probably shorter than any of us had thought. I wished I'd thought of this earlier; if I had, we could have made a contingency plan, probably involving playing cat-and-mouse with the hunters. _Shit._

No use wasting time on "could-haves;" I started climbing the side of the boat and blocked everything else out of my mind. As I reached the top, I froze and peeked over the side. No one on deck, and closest cover ten feet away. I slid over the rail and sprinted while crouching to put my back against the wall. Keeping low, I crept quietly until I reached the doorway of the little room you steered from. Hey, hell if I knew what it was called. I crouched lower; this room was occupied.

I scanned the room, looking for anything like what Heero and Wufei had described to me. I found it. Right next to the guy in the room who was boredly reading what appeared to be a bad romance novel. I decided not to let my brain go there, and firmly derailed the train of thought that produced before it left the station.

There was no cover in the room. I had two options: try to get the guy out of the room, sneak in, and grab the radio with no one the wiser; or try to take the guy out and steal the radio. Option one had issues because I had no idea how to get the guy to move. Option two had issues because it would make it obvious that I was here and had stolen the radio. Although they'd prob'ly notice anyway if a radio went missing. And shit…I looked behind me. Yep, I'd left a nice trail of water across the deck. So much for advance planning. Option two it was.

I hesitated again for a minute; I'd never killed a person before and I really wasn't sure if I wanted to right now. This guy was driving the boat for a bunch of evil bastards who were killing kids, but did that make it right for me to kill him? Had he ever actually killed anyone? Why did I take now to develop a conscience? Probably because this guy was right in front of me and acting like a normal human being…enough mental rambling. It's not like I had many options. I looked around, but there was nothing loose on the deck I could use as a weapon. I scanned the room and spotted a piece of equipment that looked heavy and unsecured. I had no idea what it was for, but what the hell.

I reached up and tried the doorknob. Unlocked. I turned it as quietly as possible, mentally thanking whoever it was who had oiled the knob. I knew as soon as I opened the door the guy inside would notice; no way not to in a room this small. So I used the small element of surprise I had. I opened the door completely all at once and slid in as quickly as possible, grabbing the whatever-the-hell-it-was in the same move. As the guy jumped and started to turn around, I moved as fast as I could and hit him in the back of the head as hard as I could.

He went down. I don't know how badly I hurt him, and I didn't much care right then. If he survived, he survived, if not, he didn't. I'd freak out about it later. I grabbed the radio, somewhat awkwardly since it was the size of a large lunchbox and if I wasn't careful the walkie-talkie part would pop off its mount and bang into things, and ran back to the side of the boat in a crouch. I scanned the beach: no people yet, and from the few yells I could hear, they were a bit occupied. I decided to count on the ambient noise being loud enough and dropped my impromptu weapon over the side of the boat, where it sank quickly.

I held the radio in my left hand and made my way down the ladder on the side of the boat in an awkward cross between a scramble and a fall. I hit the water with a slightly louder noise than I'd intended, but no one seemed to notice. Maybe no one was around to notice. It was possible the guy I'd hit was the only one on the boat right now. That would be good, because it was light enough now that I was pretty damned visible.

There was nothing I could do about it anyway, and I went swimming back toward the rocks. Swimming was damned awkward while carrying a heavy radio, even if the thing was waterproof so I didn't have to keep it dry. I ended up resorting to swimming on my back while holding the radio on my stomach. I just wasn't coordinated enough in the water to breaststroke with it in my hand. And even if I was, that damn walkie-talkie bit would probably find a way to fuck things up. Stupid detachable bits.

When I reached the rocks, I followed them to the beach and grabbed a leafy tree branch I'd hidden behind one of the last rocks earlier. I used it to sweep my tracks from behind me as I quickly crossed the sand to the woods, and then ditched it. We'd purposefully left a safe path here leading to a climbable tree, and I followed it in a sprint. I felt much better as soon as I got myself off the ground and out of easy view.

Now I let myself start listening to the sounds on the island again. I needed to be alert to the location of the hunters in order to make it back to base. There was some faint yelling to my right and crunching to my left, but none of the noises were close enough to be an immediate threat. I got moving, keeping my ears cocked. Gunshots to the right…I hoped everyone was okay. Nothing I could do about it if they weren't, so block that thought. Nothing else to the left. Maybe whoever was there either left or died. Or maybe it was a squirrel or something; little buggers can make an inordinate amount of noise compared to their size.

I slid through the trees as quietly as possible. I had to stop and backtrack once when I ran across a hunter slicing his way out of a net he'd triggered. Figures I'd find someone caught in one of the few not-instantly-deadly traps…I backed off before he saw me and took an alternate route.

It was a nerve-wracking trip, and I froze any time I heard a noise. I almost had a panic attack at one point before I realized that I was the one who'd broken a branch and made the noise. I was really starting to hate the distance from the beach to our hideout. It made us safer, but it also made getting to safety harder. Since I was hauling the radio, which seemed to be getting increasingly heavy as the morning wore on, it took me a good five hours to get back.

I practically fell out of the tree I was in and onto a platform when I arrived. Quatre popped up next to me almost immediately and grabbed the radio. "Wufei, Heero, and Trowa are out harassing the enemy along with some volunteers from the new arrivals. Heero left me detailed instructions on how to use the radio to call the police frequency. Can you try to keep the people here calm? I'm worried we'll be found if someone has hysterics loudly."

"I can try. I've got some bad news, though. I had to knock a guy out to get the radio, so even if they would have been stupid enough to not notice it being gone if I just snuck it out, they're sure going to notice now."

"I don't think it matters. They didn't leave immediately, so our revolution here has pretty much destroyed any chance we had of being left alone."

"Point." I looked for the new faces in the grove. All of them were huddled onto one platform two trees over. A quick count gave me seven. "Quatre…how many are out with Heero, Wufei, and Trowa?"

"Three. We lost two on the way in. There isn't time for a full story now, though. I'm going to try to get this working." He gestured with the radio.

I gave him a one-armed hug. "I'll go make sure our new arrivals are doing okay." I got a half smile in return.

Quatre bent to fiddling, and I hauled myself up and in the general direction of the newbies. Four of them looked to be older teens, two tweens, and one that I would swear couldn't be older than seven. The seven-ish year old (I couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl) appeared to be glued to one of the older girls. I gave a mental shrug. Hopefully that girl wouldn't mind being used as a teddy bear, because if it was helping the kid, I was all for it.

Five hours of traveling had gotten me mostly dry, but my much abused clothes were a wrinkled muddy torn wreck. My hair, per usual, was not drying well because of the braid, so I basically had a wet rope down my back, and the tree walking had yanked little bits out of the braid that were now frizzing. In a nutshell, I probably looked like crap. Which was probably why I was getting stared at.

"I'm Duo," I said and bowed theatrically as soon as I got to the right platform. "Welcome to our humble abode. If you tell me what you already know, I can fill in anything you don't. Also, please refrain from panicking until the roller coaster has completely stopped moving."

I got some stifled chuckles and a smirk or two for that comment. The girl being used as a teddy bear outright grinned at me. "I'm Ret," she said. "This's Joy," she nodded her chin at the young kid, "Pete, Jazz, Elen," the older boy and other two girls, "Max an' May," the tweens. "We got th' spiel on th' boat about bein' 'game.'" She grimaced. "There wasn' much other time f'r explanations. As soon as we hit th' woods th' blond boy over there an' th'other three had us in th' trees an' runnin'. Th' brown-haired boy got the cuffs off most us soon as we had some room. He said somethin' about callin' for help and holdin' out 'til it gets here, but then we were runnin' again, for a long time, an' all but the blond split off back near the beach. Three of th'others din't wanna sit, so they split too t' help, an' we lost two when one ran and one got shot. So what's th' full setup?"

"That's the bones of it," I told her. "I'll have to back up some to get this all told. 'Parently some bored bastard hunters decided they wanted intelligent prey. So they started pullin' street kids and buyin' extras from slavers, bringin' them to this island, and huntin' them down." I made a mental note that my street accent got worse when I was listening to someone else with the same accent. "The cops got wind, but they thought the grabbers were sellin' to the slavers, not th'other way around, so they sent in two undercovers to get grabbed. But they didn't plan for somethin' like this, so when the boat they were on, and I was on the same one, brought them here, they got stuck. We three−tha's me, the brown-haired guy who picked your cuffs, and the black-haired one−survived by runnin' and hidin' in the trees, and we met Trowa, the guy with the weird haircut, who was already here. Quatre survived from the next boatload. We made a plan to steal a radio offa one of the boats to call for help. And since we'd be advertizing ourselves by stealin' the radio, we decided to hell with it and we'd try to rescue anyone we could off the boat. Anyone got questions?" I didn't have any problem telling any of these that if we hadn't been able to rescue them we wouldn't have. They understood already.

Ret snorted. "A cop picked th' locks? Now I've seen everythin'."

I grinned back. "Not only that, I taught him how to do it. I feel evil already, corrupting the good."

She laughed. I blinked as I realized something I'd forgotten to mention. "Ah, I'm guessing you already noticed some of it on the way here, but I wouldn't recommend wanderin' in the woods by yourself, because we booby trapped most of it. If you don' know where the traps are, it's damn dangerous, and I'd rather not have anyone get hit by friendly fire. This place is safe, and it's pretty safe to travel by tree, but we did trap some of the more obvious tree-routes so it'd still be better if no one wanders off."

"Got it, boss!" Pete spoke up. "Y'all're our best chance of getting' out of here; we'll be good." He smirked at me.

"Fair enough." I gave a vague wave. "I'm gonna go see if Quatre's got anywhere with the radio."

I did my monkey impression again and slid back into Quatre's tree; he had the radio on and was talking into it. When he saw me he waved for me to sit down but kept talking. "Code red, operatives 01 and 05, require assistance. Civilians and operatives in danger, location unknown island approximately two and a half hours southeast of the mainland by boat. Repeat, code red." He let go of the radio talk button thingy for a minute. "Basically I get to keep doing this and hope someone's monitoring the frequency. It's somewhat depressing since I know no one can talk back."

I snorted. "Look at it this way, the cops can't be that stupid. Heero and Wufei's check-in time was something like five days ago. If they're _not_ monitoring every radio frequency possible, I'm not sure I want them to try to help us. They'd prob'ly just make things worse. I can just see the three stooges attempting a rescue now…" I mimed someone walking into a low-hanging branch and Quatre giggled.

"You're right. But I still feel kind of stupid saying the same thing over and over knowing I'm not going to get an answer."

"You'll get an answer. It'll just come in the form of people and not words!" I was grinning again. "Oh yeah, I talked to the new people. They'll be fine; mostly they just wanted the rundown of exactly what the hell is going on. They're all street kids, and we're damned good at staying calm when in trouble. If you've got anything simple to do, they'll prob'ly help you with it."

"That's good. Wait, help me? Please tell me you're not implying what I think you are." For a nice guy, Quatre's got a great evil eye.

"I would, but I'd be lying. I don't sit still well, I'm going to go see if I can help. I'm betting the hunters aren't going to give up since they've lost their prey and they didn't turn around immediately, and I'm pretty sure we've got a good 24 hours at least until help arrives. I also want a look at what kind of trail got left by hauling everyone here. I'm impressed, by the way. How did Heero get everyone's cuffs off in time?"

"He did them in stages. We shepherded everyone to the same place and let Heero get the cuffs off the youngest first. Then we moved everyone through the trees to a more safe location before trying for the rest of them. It was a bit close; that's how one boy got shot." Quatre's expression dimmed. "The other boy we lost thought we were taking too much of a risk and ran off on his own. We pointed him away from the booby traps, but he got caught by one of the hunters."

I put my hand on his shoulder. "We got most of them out. They'd all have died if we weren't here. Focus on that." It's what I was doing.

I got a tremulous smile. "I'm trying, but sometimes…"

"I know. You get back on the radio, I'll go see if I can help the others."

"Be careful!"

I laughed. "No shit?"


	10. Chapter 10

Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, I'm just having fun with them.

A/N: So this is the chapter with my favorite line in it. Interestingly enough, said by Wufei; go figure. I got enough reviews to bug me into updating early, so here you go. See? Reviews do make me update. And they make me happy. Hint hint. Anyway, enjoy!

Chapter 10

By now, I didn't really even mind the trees. I used all the tricks I'd picked up over the last week to move quickly and quietly back toward the beach. I moved for over an hour before I heard any noise, which was encouraging since it meant no one was anywhere near our hideout yet. The rustling came from the ground, which was even better. I moved closer, keeping to trees with lots of leaves so I was hard to see.

It took me a good five minutes to triangulate and find the source of the noise, since it came in spurts and was getting quieter. I find out why when I got there. A hunter had stumbled into one of our more deadly traps and sprung a net with sharpened wooden stakes in it.

The stakes were short and spaced all over, so it was pretty much impossible to get below or around them in the net, as this guy had demonstrated. He was slowly bleeding out from gashes, although he'd just about managed to get out of the net. It actually looked like he'd injured himself worse moving around.

Currently he was trying to saw through the net with a wicked-looking knife. As I watched, his hand shook and he dropped the knife. He wavered for a few minutes and then seemed to pass out. I gave it some more time to be sure and then carefully moved to a tree directly over his position. I hooked my legs on a branch and dangled backwards above the guy. Nope, not breathing.

I decided to rearm the trap and leave the body where it was, just to screw with the head of anyone else who came this way.

While I was at it, I went through the guy's pockets for anything useful and took his weapons since I was currently unarmed. The only things I found besides the knives and a handgun were a fountain pen with no ink and pocket lint, which wasn't really surprising since these people had never had any intention of being on the island longer than a few hours. I set one of the knives up on my left hip for cross-body draw and put the other one at the back of my neck where I could reach it with either hand. The handgun I checked to make sure the safety was on and then shoved in my right pocket; I didn't have any experience with handguns and didn't want to chance it. The knives were more familiar.

It might seem like all the death and destruction wasn't bothering me. And is sort of wasn't, but only because I was refusing to let it. If I fell apart at this point, Bad Things would happen and people were counting on me. I was doing now what I'd done earlier on the boat and compartmentalizing my thoughts, shoving all the shit I did not have time to deal with now to the back of my head so I could have one massive breakdown later. I treated searching and moving the body as a task to be done and nothing else. Now was the time for action; later was the time for catatonia.

I got everything re-setup and got back in the trees and kept moving, listening for any more noises.

I wandered for a good three hours without anything major happening. I ran across two more bodies in the woods, one a lot closer to the beach and one somewhere in the mid-range that I was spending most of my time in. One body had already been stripped by someone else, although I had no clue who it was; could have been another hunter for all I knew, since that trap involved a noose and couldn't be reset. The other body had a compass that I pocketed and a shotgun I slung over my shoulder after making very very sure the safety was on and it wouldn't go off when I didn't want it to. That would have been not fun. I took the guy's ammo and backpack-pouch-thing too, since the ammo would be nice to have and I was seriously running out of pocket space.

Since my wandering attempts at running into the others were epically failing, I decided to head in the general direction of home base. If I was lucky, maybe I'd run into one of the guys on the way. If I wasn't, I could still ditch the shotgun and handgun; hauling them around was getting damned awkward, damned quickly. Stupid hooky bits on tree branches…

I took the scenic route on my way back to make sure my trail was hard to follow and as a check to see if any hunters were getting to close. The sky was just starting to think about maybe getting dark when I stuck my head into base. "Hey, Quatre, any news?" I waved as I headed towards him.

He straightened up and headed towards me from where he had been showing one of the new kids how to tie a good knot in a vine. There was a whole group of them working on what looked like some nets and a few stakes. That was a good idea; we could fix old traps or add new ones as long as we had the materials. "Not much. Trowa dropped by to check in and make sure everything was going all right. Heero came by once to give a more complete story into the radio in some sort of code and dropped off the boy with him; he said he didn't like the distraction." Quatre frowned as I looked over to pick out the unfamiliar face in the group. "The poor boy was devastated."

I decided to derail that conversation before it got started. "Look at it this way, he's safer in here than out there. Heck, that might even have been Heero's intention in ditching him. You never know." As I talked I pulled the shotgun off my shoulder and the handgun out of my pocket. "Speaking of safety, you know how to use either of these?"

He frowned. "Not very well."

"I guess we can just call them additions to the armory then; leave 'em in a pile and let Heero and Wufei grab them if they need them." I looked around for a good place to put them and finally settled on the platform with the radio on it and ditched the ammo along with them, although I kept the bag I'd grabbed. "You're taking a break from talking into the Magical Box of Get Help?" I asked.

"Yes. My voice was fading out from constantly talking, so I decided to take a break and show everyone how to make some traps. I thought they might come in handy."

"It's a good idea. The traps are working surprisingly well; I pulled both those weapons off of already dead people, and I never ran into any living ones. Of course, given the size of this island that's not really surprising. I never ran into Heero, Trowa, or Wufei either. We need some sort of signal or way to find each other if we need to." I gave a half grin. "Wandering around like an idiot just isn't working."

"You should have thought of that earlier, it would have been more useful then," Wufei called sarcastically as he dropped into the clear area, a scruffy boy following him down in a less graceful half fall. Wufei was carrying several things slung over his shoulder, proof that I wasn't the only one going through dead people's stuff.

"Hey, you didn't think of it either!" I protested. "And none of us ever split up for this long before. This island's just too damn big."

"I'm not sure a signal's a good idea," Quatre broke in. "A noise would alert anyone nearby, as would any visual signal. I think the best idea may be to have everyone check in here at designated intervals. Then if one person needs to get in touch with another, they can leave a message."

"Uh…" I blinked. "Sounds like it'll work." Wufei nodded. I grinned. "Guess that makes you the answering machine, huh?"

Quatre made a face at me. "Should I make a beep noise then?"

"To be technically accurate, you should repeat an asinine message and _then_ make a beep noise, but I think we can skip that." Wufei sighed. "I actually came back to bring Rick in; he doesn't have the stamina to keep moving for this long. He can join your trap-making crew, and while I'm here I can take a few traps with me to set." We all looked over at Rick, who had apparently decided that parking his butt on the ground was a good idea and was quickly picking up the trick to knotting vines together.

I blinked as I got my brain back in gear. "Ah, while you're here, I ran into three dead guys. One had already been stripped, two hadn't, and the guns and ammo I pulled off 'em are over there." I gestured towards the platform.

Wufei eyed my knives and shrugged philosophically. "I suppose it's best to stick with what you know."

I rolled my eyes. Duh. "Keeping track of the baddies still alive in the woods is probably a good idea. How many do you know are dead? The body I found that was already stripped was in a noose trap about two hours thataway." I pointed.

Wufei shook his head. "Not one I tracked." He pulled a sack and a shotgun off his back as he talked. "I know three perished immediately at the beach before they figured out we had trapped the woods. There were, however, too many others around to search the bodies. I followed one of the more adept hunters in and used stealth to knock him into a spiked pit once he was far enough from the rest of the group to not alert them with noise. I took his gear with me." He hefted the sack and handed it to Quatre. "There should be some useful things in there."

Wufei backed up until he could sit on a squiggly bit of tree. I was guessing Rick wasn't the only one who needed a break. "Unfortunately," he continued, "I believe they're getting smarter. I managed to pick off one other straggler I ran into by chance, but other than that the sweep I made to try to find any more hunters got me nowhere. They're good enough not to leave tracks, and, as Duo pointed out, the island's just too damned big."

While Wufei had been talking, Quatre had been going through the bag he'd been handed. "Ah ha!" He pulled out what looked like a sketchbook.

"Who the hell takes a sketchbook on a maniacal hunting spree?"

"Does it matter, Duo? Keeping track of how many hunters are out there is a good idea, and it will be easier if I have something to write in." He detached a pencil from the side of the book and flipped it open. It took some turning to find a blank page; whoever the book belonged too, they weren't a bad artist. Emphasis on the past tense. I derailed that train of thought. "Duo found three dead, Wufei can account for five, so there are six more out there. Heero and Trowa may have taken some out though. And we shouldn't discount the boats; the people left on them may get involved at some point."

I snorted. "So there's at least four enemies unaccounted for and possibly a whole bunch that we don't know about. Yay helpful."

"Actually," Wufei said speculatively, "assuming no one has moved from the boats to the woods yet besides the hunters, we can fix that problem by setting a watch on the boats again."

"That's damned dangerous since they know we're here," I warned. "And it'd be too dangerous to send any of the new ones, they're not good enough in the trees yet."

Quatre nodded. "It would have to be one of the five of us, since we know the island and the traps well enough by now to run in an absolute emergency."

Wufei continued that train of thought. "Heero and Trowa are unreachable until they come back here, which is likely to be too long from now. Quatre, you're on radio duty since I don't trust Duo to not start cracking jokes and confusing the people on the other end−"

"Hey!"

"−and I'd prefer to be free to move." Both Quatre and Wufei looked at me expectantly. Did I have a "Pick Me for Lousy Jobs" sign on my forehead or something?

I rolled my eyes. "Fine, I'll go for now. But I vote we have shifts, that way anyone who needs a break from general mayhem can boat watch and whoever's on boat watch can get off before the monotony drives them bonkers." And by _them_ I meant _me_. "Plus it's getting dark, and sleep would be a good thing that keeps people aware and not crazy, so I'd like to have some at some point tonight."

"That's fair," Quatre said. "We'll send whoever's available to spell you later."

I sighed theatrically. "Then I guess I get to go be bored out of my skull again. While at the same time having to stay alert constantly. Oh wait, that sounds like normal life. Well, except for the presence of guns and me being a specific target…uh." I stopped talking since I was getting an unreadable look from Wufei and a somewhat shocked one from Quatre. Okay, shouldn't have said that. I decided to switch the topic. "Before I take off, what do we want the designated check-in interval to be? For when I get off boring watch."

Wufei apparently decided to go with it. "Hm. Maybe five hours? That's enough time to cover a good chunk of the intermediate woods. If someone intends to go farther, say to the beach, they can say so when they check in and get a time extension."

Figures a police man would come up with the verbal version of overtime paperwork. Well, whatever worked. "'Kay. I'll go stare at the beach now. I'll use the place where we found Quatre. We put enough traps in that area that it should be pretty safe to stay in; anyone coming in from the ground would make a lot of noise and make themselves nice and obvious." I took one last opportunity to stretch my back out completely since I'd be traveling through and then sitting in trees for the next ten or so hours. I also grabbed some food from our stash to munch on the way. "Catch you all later." I waved back on my way out.


	11. Chapter 11

Disclaimer: Not my characters. Well, not the G-boys, anyway. The OCs are mine.

A/N: This chapter is being posted now in honor of the fact that I return to college tomorrow and am trying my damnedest not to think about this fact (Free time! I shall miss you!). This is nice and distracting. Also, I'm rather proud of this chapter because I think I actually managed to be somewhat cute. And points to PyroRoxas for finding my favorite line in the previous chapter. Making fun of answering machines is fun (I hate the things). Anyway, reviews make me update faster (and motivate me to write my next fic faster). Enjoy.

Chapter 11

I made it to the beach in a record-breaking (at least for me; I bet Trowa could do it faster) three and a half hours. I ran into nothing and no one, although I did spot a few traps here and there that had been disarmed after I got about three quarters of the way back to the beach. Possibly those were due to one of the confirmed dead hunters, possibly they weren't. Either way I had a different job at the moment and kept moving.

When I got where I was going, I parked my butt in a tree and watched the beach. Keeping tabs on the boats was a good idea. I agreed with that. But why me again? It really was both boring and nerve-wracking, since pretty much nothing was happening, but I had to stay on alert in case something A) happened with the boats or B) happened in the woods near me. And failing to catch either of those could end up with me dead. But nothing was happening. Bored.

I set my ears to catch noises from the woods around me, and made sure I'd catch any movement from the boats with my eyes. Then I amused myself in creative ways like finding patterns in the stars and naming them.

Once there was movement on the captive's boat, but no one got off so I called it a false alarm. There was no movement at all on the hunter's boat.

At some time probably after midnight−_If I get out of this alive, I'm getting a watch!_−, my ears caught movement to my right. I could see very very little of my surroundings due the fact that trying to see anything in the woods was currently a study in black on black, but I could tell the noise came from the ground. That meant hunter.

I strained my eyes and ears to try to pinpoint the exact location and direction of movement. I was on hyper-sensitive mode, the one I used when I was in the wrong section of town at the wrong time and any noise meant trouble. I heard the softest brush of sound diagonally behind me to the right at the same time I heard another shift straight to my right.

I closed my eyes and concentrated. The diagonal sound was off the ground, making it most likely a friend, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. I moved from a sitting position to a crouch, getting ready for fight or flight.

My eyes flew open and I almost started right off my branch when there was a sudden crashing to the right. In the nanosecond before I uncoiled off my branch and shot in the direction of the noise, my mind flashed possibilities and came to the conclusion that the most likely was a friend and an enemy had just run into each other.

I reached the source of the noise in about three seconds in a rather noisy manner, which turned out to be a good thing. It distracted both Heero and the hunter about to shoot him enough that both of them jerked in unexpected ways. The bullet aimed at Heero's head went wide and low and grazed his shoulder instead.

From the vague outlines I could see of their positions, my best guess was the hunter had heard or spotted Heero and Heero had done another flying squirrel leap to get close enough to kill the hunter before he fired his gun. Unfortunately, it looked like the hunter knew enough unarmed combat to throw Heero off and buy himself enough time to level the gun at his head again. Which was when I came in.

I had no time for any strategy. I'd startled both people, but the hunter still had his gun pointed at Heero and for all I knew someone had heard the first gunshot and was coming to investigate and help kill the renegade prey.

So I did something stupid. I threw myself at the hunter.

I dove off my branch and straight into the man, yanking the knife at the back of my neck out of its sheathe as I went. I kept that arm out wide so I didn't accidently stab myself and used my left arm to shove the hunter's gun hand up and past my head, thanking God that this one had a handgun and not a shotgun, which would have been a lot more difficult to get out of the way without hurting myself in the process. I both heard and felt the gun go off next to my head as I dragged my right hand and its knife around and down in a slashing motion across the hunter's neck, and warm and wet splashed across my face as I struggled to hold the thrashing body down.

I found myself shaking as the man spasmed and then stopped moving. I felt Heero pull me off the body and although I could tell he was saying something, I didn't know what it was. I turned and buried my face in his chest. After a few seconds of reaction, I consciously shoved 90% of what had just happened into the bin in the back of my head marked "Deal With Later" and forced myself to stop shaking.

As I calmed down Heero loosened his arms, which at some point had wound up around me, and reached to take the knife I hadn't realized I was still holding. I almost had a panic attack at the idea that I could have stabbed Heero, but managed not to since I hadn't. I let Heero take the knife and clean it on the dead man's shirt, and when he handed it back I resheathed it. I was glad it was too dark to see well.

"Let's go," Heero murmured. He grabbed my hand and led me to a climbable tree and gently shoved me in the general direction of up. I was sliding into shock if I wasn't already there, so I just went where directed.

Heero followed me into the tree and then led the two of us further back into the forest, hanging onto my hand whenever possible. I felt like there was a pane of glass slid between me and the rest of the world that was distorting everything I saw or heard. Eventually Heero stopped and tugged me down out of the tree. I followed and realized from the noises that we were near the stream.

We moved over to the stream and Heero let go of my hand to pull a pouch off his shoulder and rummage through it. He came out with a cloth, bent down to wet it in the stream, and then used it to gently clean my face. Sometime between Heero gently wiping the blood off my forehead and my cheek I lost it again and dove in to cry on his shoulder. His arms around me felt nice, supportive. I had just enough awareness of my surroundings to try to keep quiet, since I did not want a repeat of what just happened.

Heero murmured reassuring things in my ear and rubbed my back. I was winding down when one of my hands slid over Heero's shoulder and I discovered he was bleeding. That snapped me out of my looking glass world real quick. "You're hurt!"

"Shh, and it's not bad, just a graze," Heero murmured.

"It's bleeding!" I bent over to grab the cloth that had gotten dropped at some point and rinsed it out so I could use it to clean Heero's shoulder. I discovered then that I'd pulled something in my right leg pretty badly jumping out of that tree, but I chose to ignore it.

I suspected that normally if I tried to take care of Heero at all he'd probably get angry and shove me away hard, but I think he realized having something to focus on helped, so he let me wash his shoulder and then use another cloth pulled out of his bag to tie off the wound.

When I rinsed out the cloth again I splashed my face and shook off the last bits of my breakdown. I took a deep breath. "Now what?" I asked.

"For right now, we need to move. The noise would have attracted attention and we're not far enough away yet." Heero was back in business mode. "Watching the beach from close by will be too dangerous now. They'll be watching the immediate treeline. We should get back to base and talk with the others."

I nodded and we set off, being extra careful to not make noise or leave a trail after the scare we'd just had. I had a random guilty thought that I was making Heero go right back to where he came from, assuming Quatre had sent him to spell me, but that was ridiculously absurd, so I gave my brain a mental kick and told it to start working again. I'm not sure if it did any good.

Per usual it took an absurdly long amount of time to get back to base, and I used a lot of the time to get my head screwed back on the rest of the way. When we hauled ourselves into the grove, me moving damned awkwardly because of my right leg, Quatre immediately rushed over. "What happened?" He eyed the makeshift bandage on Heero's arm; given the lack of light, and the fact that it was white, it was pretty much the only readily visible evidence of our altercation. "Actually, if this is as complicated as I think it's going to be, wait for a bit. Both Wufei and Trowa are supposed to check in in about ten minutes."

Heero frowned. "I thought we were trying not to overlap the times."

"Wufei wanted to make a wide loop around the entire island to search for trails, which would take at least four hours in and of itself, which makes eight or so with travel time. I told him he could do it, but he had to be back here by the end of eight hours. Trowa is just doing a basic sweeps, but he's been pushing the end of his five hours. It's just chance they landed at the same point. And you aren't supposed to be back at all." He looked worried.

"Explanation only once would be appreciated," I said. I looked around the clearing area and raised an eyebrow. "Did _all _the newbies crash?" There were lumps on the platforms and no one on the ground.

"Ret went to get water from the stream. But mostly yes. They're pretty exhausted, and with the light gone there's not much else they can do. All of them have too thick of an accent to use the radio." Quatre sighed. "Might as well let them sleep, since it looks like none of the rest of us are getting any."

"Is there a reason attached to that, out of curiosity? Sleep was the point in getting me spelled out as watchman, but the rest of you have all been here the entire time," I pointed out.

"We haven't been able to find the last two hunters," Heero answered.

Quatre mouthed "Two?" but otherwise stayed quiet. I did mental math and figured that between them Heero and Trowa must have taken out three hunters.

"I wanted to at least pinpoint their locations before sleeping. Wufei thinks the same. I don't know about Trowa."

"I wouldn't be able to sleep with this many people in danger." We all started and looked over to the other side of the grove where Trowa had dropped out of a tree. "I told Quatre to get some sleep." He sounded moderately reproachful. This time both my eyebrows went up.

"I couldn't sleep when I knew you all were in danger…" Quatre sounded sheepish.

I sighed. "So basically, we're all insomniacs now. Yay us. And you know, after we finish this conversation I vote we post a guard around this camp. I'm tired of jumping every time someone else walks in unexpectedly. Climbs. Whatever."

"I c'n watch f'r now."

We all started. "Case in point," I sighed.

"I slept f'r a while earlier," Ret said as she walked over to a platform and set what I thought were two canteens on it. Again, bad lighting. "I'll circle a ways out an' either get help 'r yell if an'thin' happens."

We all looked at Quatre. He sighed. "If you're willing to take the risk." She nodded. "Then thank you."

Ret slid out. She moved pretty well in the trees for not having been at it for a week or more like the rest of us. We had an awkward silence for about a minute before I looked around and walked over to park on the squiggly bit of tree Wufei had claimed earlier. "You're limping," Heero said. I could hear the frown in his voice.

"Twisted my right leg some when I jumped earlier. It's mostly annoying."

"Wufei had better get here soon," Quatre muttered.

The mention of Wufei sparked a random thought from earlier in the day. "Hey Trowa, didn't you have a shadow?"

"I brought her back when it got too dark to see the trees well."

"Oh. Good idea."

A few minutes later we heard a call from the trees before Wufei dropped in. "I ran into Ret. She said everyone was here. And why is she on watch?"

I leaned my head back and bonked it against the tree. "You mean _besides_ the fact that we're all tired enough to drop? I really want coffee right about now…"

"Duo!"

"Calm down, Quatre. We need a powwow with everyone to talk about shit. Heero and I had a…misadventure. We were waiting for you to get back so everyone hears at once."

Quatre crossed to sit against another tree near mine. "From what Heero said before, I'm guessing you ran into another hunter?"

"Yes." Everyone looked at Heero. "I had almost reached Duo's position at the beach when a hunter combing that area spotted me. I didn't have time to draw a gun so I went for him. He threw me off and was about to shoot me. Duo arrived just in time to tackle him and take him out. Unfortunately, it caused enough commotion that I don't think watching the boats from the trees will be safe from now on."

I was glad Heero had left out details, but I was still getting stared at. "Heero's injured." Now _he_ was getting stared at. Much better.

"It's just a graze. I'm fine."

"You're both okay?" Yep, we'd gotten Quatre worried.

"I pulled something in my right leg, but beyond that I'm good." Not mentioning breakdowns. Heero just grunted.

Wufei decided to change the subject. I was guessing he'd learned from working with Heero on his last assignment that you couldn't get him to talk if he didn't want to. "So we can't watch the beach directly. Would swinging past at odd intervals to check for movement do any good? There would be gaps in our surveillance during which more enemies could move to the forest."

I gave a shrug more from habit than for expression, since basically no one could see me. "The entire time I was watching pretty much nothing happened. I saw some of those ridiculously bulky guards on the deck of the captive's boat once, but that was it and they never left the boat. If we want to keep track of enemies, add those guards to the list but I think that's it."

"You know…" Quatre sounded like he was thinking out loud. "We may be able to discount the guards on the boat. If they left the boat, we could theoretically steal it. It wouldn't work in practice because we now have too many people with us to safely get everyone on board and away, but the hunters don't necessarily know that. It may be why the guards are still on the boat at all."

I blinked. "You might be right. There were, what, four guards on that boat total when we got here?" I got various agreeing noises. "I saw two on the captive's boat, and only two. They may have sent two over to guard the other boat at some point. I don't know for sure; no one on the hunter's boat ever came out on deck."

"We don't know for sure. There's a chance we have four fewer enemies to deal with. There's an equal chance at least some of them moved to the woods at some point we are unaware of. It's better to be overly cautious than foolhardy." Point to Heero. But damn some good news would be nice. "We know for sure that there are two hunters somewhere in the woods. Trowa, Wufei, did you find any sign of them?"

"No."

"Nothing. Whoever these two are, they're good."

We had awkward silence for a minute. I sighed. "Is there anything new we can or should be doing? If not, I think we're back to patrolling and trying to find tracks and trails. It should be getting lighter soon, which'll make both our job and the hunters' easier."

"Heero, Wufei, the police will definitely have been monitoring the radio?" Quatre asked.

"Yes. We were a long time overdue for our checkin, and that radio frequency is the emergency backup," Heero confirmed.

"Then assuming they got the message when I first started sending yesterday, how long do you think it will take help to arrive?"

"Emergency response takes several hours to mobilize. Some time will be spent determining our position and getting medical ready. It is approximately two and a half hours to here from our original starting position, which was several hours out of the city. Add in the time for bureaucratic paperwork−" Heero had a sense of humor. Who knew? "−and I'd put arrival time at around twenty-four hours, give or take an hour or two."

"Then we have between six and seven hours before help gets here. For now, patrols are still the best option. In an emergency or as time gets short, we can pull in and circle base to make sure no one gets close."

"I don't like leaving this place that unguarded. I'd like to start circling the perimeter now," Trowa said. "Duo, Heero, and Wufei can search for the missing hunters."

"The added security would be nice," Quatre acknowledged. "Any objections?" No one spoke up. "All right then. Trowa will circle, I'll stay on the radio, and Heero, Duo, and Wufei will patrol. Check in when you get the chance and don't get killed."

I hid a smirk. He was looking at Trowa when he said that last bit. And I'm pretty sure Trowa volunteered to circle because he was worried about Quatre. It was cute.


	12. Chapter 12

Disclaimer: Not my characters, I don't own them.

A/N: I've got about 20 minutes before I have to go somewhere, so I figured I'd post this. Story's winding down, just two more chapters to go after this one. Reviews make me post faster. Possibly also write faster, but I'm not so sure that has as much to do with reviews as free time, of which I have very little right now. Anyway, tell me what you like, hate, got confused by, think is unrealistic, etc. Enjoy.

Chapter 12

I had hauled myself off my tree root and was heading for a low platform when I realized Heero was following me. "I was going to head thataway." I pointed in a vaguely west-ish direction. At least I thought it was west. And then I realized I could see my finger somewhat, which meant it was getting lighter and since the sun was coming up in back of me…yeah, west.

"I'm going with you."

And that just felt like a board to the head. "Wait, what? Why?"

"You're still limping. You may need help."

And that gave me warm fuzzies. I think my head was more fucked up than I was ready to acknowledge. "Um. Okay."

The two of us did our squirrel impression and took to the trees. We couldn't talk because of the danger of being heard, Heero'd proved that earlier when he got found by just the noise from moving, but I refused to let the silence be awkward. Perception can change a lot of things. I used the power of perception again when it got light enough for me to see myself well and determinedly chose to ignore the blood stains splashed across my front.

We wandered in a zigzag-type pattern around once we'd gotten a good distance out, watching for tracks on the ground as well as disarmed traps. With the woods this size, we were basically trying to find a needle in a haystack. At one point we did run into a disarmed trap, but following the slight trail it gave pulled us in a wide loop around some impassible brush and then to a place where Heero stopped me moving because he'd recognized the trail from this point on as one of the hunters he'd tracked earlier. So yeah, wasted time.

After about two hours of finding diddly squat we headed back to base again. With total travel time, we'd been out for three hours. Four more left…the back corner of my brain was stubbornly keeping a steady countdown of Time Until Help Arrived that I was trying to ignore before it distracted me and got me killed. My right leg was doing a good job of distracting me from the countdown since it had decided to hurt like a bitch whenever I did something too acrobatic. I was glad Heero was with me; a few times I'd needed help to pull off some of the crazier tree transfers.

Arrival at base got us a wave from Quatre, who was by the radio, and from all the kids who were, it looked like, practicing moving through the trees. I wound up with a stupid grin on my face; a lot of them were in various really goofy looking positions trying to figure out how to get from one tree to another. Ret had Joy and was actually having to hold on tight to keep the kid from flying squirrel leaping from one tree to another. It was nice to see someone having fun.

We hauled ourselves over to Quatre's platform and sat down next to him. I kept an eye on the trees both to make sure no one fell out and for amusement purposes. A few kids were now trying to imitate the way Heero and I had moved from one tree to another, and it was pretty funny to watch. It also kept me from looking directly at Quatre, who was eyeing the bloodstains on my shirt with distress. He was definitely too nice of a guy for this shit.

"We found nothing," Heero told Quatre.

He sighed. "At this point I think just patrolling in concentric circles is our best bet."

I took a guess at what "concentric" meant. "So we're just going to make sure no one gets near us before time is up? Works for me. I want food before I head back out though." Wandering had taken us past the stream a few times, but I was damned hungry after all that work.

"We're running low. It might be better if you find something while you're patrolling; I don't want to send any of the kids out because of the danger."

"I know where there are some berry bushes," Heero said.

"That solves that then." I gave mental sigh as I hauled myself up again. Around thirty hours of no sleep was not fun. Doable, especially with adrenaline, but not fun. "And off we go, into the wild green yonder…again. I definitely feel like a tennis ball now."

"At least that's better than a mushroom," Quatre muttered.

Heero turned a laugh into a cough. "How far out is Trowa patrolling?"

"About half a mile."

"We'll head about a mile out then. Tell Wufei when he checks in."

The two of us found the blackberry bushes Heero'd seen to the southeast of base, and from there we moved out and started circling.

Two hours later, we were northwest of the grove when I froze as the breeze blew into my face. "Heero, we decided not to set any fires," I said softly. "There's smoke somewhere."

His eyes widened and he turned his head into the breeze as he caught the scent too. "Base. Now."

We got back as quickly as possible, which was about half an hour later. Damn distances. By then, there was a lot more smoke, and it was obvious that it was coming from the north. This time we pretty much catapulted into base, aiming directly for Quatre's platform. Trowa was already there. "I went up the tallest tree I could find; they fired the north woods in a crescent across the beach line, and with the wind it's spreading in this direction."

"They're trying to drive us to the south beach where the boats are," Quatre said. "It will probably work. The island is completely forested. We've been using that to travel, and now they're using it to burn us out. There's no time to build a firebreak, even if any of us know how to."

"It's worse than that," Heero said. "We trapped all the easily walkable routes to the north part of the island, and I know we got every possible way onto that beach. The only way to get that far is by the trees. It's not surprising given the amount of traveling we've been doing, and consequently the trails we've left, but this means our safe routes have been compromised."

We all stared at each other for a moment. "We're going to need to move everyone anyway," Quatre said. "Wufei was another half mile further out than you two, so he should be in soon. As soon as he gets here, we need to get everyone up and in the trees and moving. Once it really catches, the fire is likely to burn fast; I don't think it's rained here in a while."

"It's been about two weeks," Trowa confirmed.

"Let's use the time until Wufei gets back to get everyone ready to go," Quatre said. "Duo…"

"I'm on it." The next ten minutes were spent with me explaining to the kids exactly what was going down this time while Heero sent some sort of message with the radio and Trowa and Quatre pulled useful things to take with us out of the pile of gear we'd accumulated.

By the time Wufei arrived we were ready to go. He took one look at us, shook his head, and asked, "Where are we going to go?"

I was glad he asked, because I had been wondering. If the fire was north, "safe" was south, but the hunters were trying to drive us to where they could kill us so that wasn't safe after all. I'd have asked myself, but I'd been busy explaining to all the street kids why we needed to move and how dangerous it was going to be.

"As much as I hate playing into their hands, down towards the beach is about the only option." Quatre sighed. "Trowa went back up the tall tree, and the fire's spreading faster and fairly completely. With the smoke too, there isn't going to be anywhere else safe for any length of time."

"South it is." Heero slung his shotgun across his back. "I want myself on point, Wufei on right flank, Trowa on left, and Quatre on rear guard. Duo, keep everyone together and moving." I almost protested but decided I probably was the one best equipped to keep the kids in line since I had the best idea of what they could and could not do. And even if I did protest, Heero'd prob'ly just stick me on tail instead of Quatre and that was likely to be just as redundant and pointless as babysitter. So I sucked it up and we got moving.

I got handed the radio since I wasn't on a sentry position, not that it mattered much since I wasn't using it and couldn't have if I wanted to while we were moving. I was very very glad of the backpack thing I had to shove stuff in since it kept my hands free for climbing.

During the longass trip to the beach, Heero, Wufei, Trowa, and Quatre would move in from their outside positions to make sure everyone in the group was making it all right and to quip nice things like "not dead yet" after I made one too many cracks about getting picked off by snipers. Originally the four of them were doing sweeps from a good way out, but as we got close to the beach and the danger area they tightened the security loop to the point where anyone who yelled would get backup within a very short amount of time.

By that time some of the younger kids were flagging. The older kids and I boosted them as we went, but we were definitely making more noise than I wanted to be making. At least all of us were in dark colors, since anything that hadn't been dark originally was by now dirty enough to count. We were moving at a fairly good rate, but the fire seemed to be moving faster. The smoke in the air was thickening to the point where I at least was smothering coughs, although I couldn't see or feel the fire itself yet.

We slowed down as we got close to the beach. I could see sand between the trees. Heero slid back and murmured "There's no one visible on the beach" into my ear before climbing back to try to get a better look. I passed on his observation when everyone else popped in for updates.

This could be massively bad. If no one was on the beach, the next logical thought was that they were in the forest, possibly in the trees, waiting for us.

Which prediction got proved right about two minutes later when a voice from behind us called, "Drop your weapons if you want the boy to live."

Everyone froze. I chanced a glance backwards and started running profanity through my head. A man, obviously one of the two missing hunters had moved up from behind us using the trees and had a gun to Quatre's head. I slowly unhooked the knife at my left hip and dropped it. Wufei, who was also currently within eyesight, cursed softly as he dropped the shotgun he had over his shoulder to the ground.

I still had the dagger at the back of my neck since it wasn't visible because of my braid. With luck, which currently seemed to have buggered off to safer areas, I might get a chance at the hunter. I purposefully blocked any and all memories of my last experience using that knife. Wufei probably−scratch that, definitely− had another weapon too. And Trowa and Heero were somewhere to the left and front. Still, any stupid heroics were impossible as long as the guy had ahold of Quatre, and it didn't look like he was letting go.

A good chunk of my hopes died completely as a thud noise on the beach side heralded Heero's arrival within visible space at the barrel of another gun. Here was hunter number two. Heero'd been forced to drop his shotgun as well. Trowa was now the only one unaccounted for. Luckily it didn't seem like these guys knew that they were missing someone.

"Single file to the beach, now," the hunter in front ordered. We moved. I stumbled and fell as I dropped from the trees to the ground and promptly got kicked in the side by the guy holding the gun on Heero. Both Heero and I growled at him. I have never understood the point of kicking people who stumble when you're trying to move them. It's not going to help; if anything it's going to make them stumble more, so what the hell?

As usual, my head was going in random circles in a crisis. Yay. I shoved it back on track and surveyed the situation. I'd bet Heero could get himself free if we distracted the guy holding him. The problem was any distraction would make someone else a target, and it may not distract the guy holding Quatre too. Damn.

I caught a flicker of movement in the trees out of the corner of my eye. Maybe a coordinated effort…I glared at the guy holding Heero, willing him to spontaneously combust. "So you all wanted an exciting hunt? Well, now most of your buddies are dead. What's the point of all this?!" I shifted and transferred my glare to the guy with Quatre. "Do all of you have a screw loose or somethin', thinkin' people make good target practice?" I thickened my accent and kept going. From there I started hurling insults, going from general profanity to insulting their ancestors to switching languages and using all the curse words I'd picked up ever.

The guy holding Heero was staring at me tolerantly like I was a pet that was trying a new trick. The other man looked like he was trying not to laugh uproariously. "The point?" he finally choked out. "You just proved the point! The others were inferior hunters; they didn't survive an encounter with truly intelligent and resourceful prey. Moving through the trees was a stroke of genius. But the two of us have outmaneuvered your group. This has been the best hunt yet. Stealing the radio was a creative thought on your part, though I don't know who you'd be trying to contact. Who would be listening?"

My inner self cackled and rubbed his hands. They didn't know we had the frequency to contact the police, so in some way we were still ahead in this chess match. Then my inner self smacked me over the head for that metaphor; I suck at chess. I went for a bit more time. "You're killin' people!"

"So? Who misses street rats like you?"

I caught a flick of movement out of the corner of my eye again and this time dove for the feet of the guy holding Heero. Apparently Heero had seen the same thing and spun to grab the gun barrel and wrestle it up and away while my tackle knocked the guy over. We ended with me lying on the guy's legs and Heero pointing the gun at his head. I looked over to the other side. Trowa's first thrown rock had put a nasty gash on the other hunter's hand and knocked his gun barrel away from any people, and the second one had hit the guy in the head while Wufei tackled him. Wufei now had a knife pulled from who-knows-where at the guy's throat. I'm not sure he needed it though; the rock to the head had left at least a cut and possibly some brain damage. Hopefully some brain damage.

Since Heero had the guy I was sitting on pinned, I got off and discovered I'd done more damage to my right leg when I almost fell over. "Everyone inside the tree line now," Heero barked. We got moving, although Wufei pretty much had to drag his guy.

"Does anyone have rope?" I asked the general populace once we were under cover, trying not to cough. I was pretty sure Heero had just wanted us out of view of the boats in case anyone on there decided to join the party and bring more weapons, and the smoke was getting to dangerous levels. "I don't want a repeat of the trick I just pulled, so it'd be nice if we got these guys tied up."

"I do." Ret pulled a coil of vine-rope out of the bag I hadn't realized she had. Showed where my priorities had ended up; time was I'd have noted everything everyone was carrying so I could keep tabs on what I could steal if I needed to. For some reason, hunters trying to kill me had screwed with my reflexes. Can't imagine why.

Insert mental snort here.

Trowa had trotted over to us at this point and was making sure Quatre wasn't hurt. I decided they were being cute enough that I wouldn't make a disparaging remark, so I grabbed Ret's rope and switched Wufei so I held the knife on the hunter while he tied the guy up. I was impressed the man was still conscious at all, although I was pretty sure he had a concussion and the knife wasn't really needed.

By now the other hunter was cursing at us and being generally insulting around coughs himself. I tuned out any insults I already knew and made mental notes of the ones I didn't so I could use them some other time. Hey, it works!

With one threat completely taken care of, we had some breathing room, figuratively if not literally. We'd need to get out of the woods soon before we all choked on the damn smoke. Trowa detached himself from Quatre long enough to go cannibalize some rope off the closest net trap so we could tie the other guy up. Wufei did the tying again, and gagged the guy for good measure. I don't know what they taught Heero and Wufei for police training, but it seemed to have involved more knots than boy scouts know. Go figure.

I limped to where I had a decent view of the beach to make sure no one had gotten off the boats. No one had; I was guessing this was massively out of Burly Guard job description. "Think if we went out on the beach we'd have people start shooting at us from the boats?" I asked.

"It's a distinct possibility." Wufei sighed and then started coughing; deep breaths a good idea were not. "I don't think we have a choice," he choked out.

"One minute." Trowa darted off into the underbrush and popped back out with any and all previously dropped weapons.

"Good idea," I managed as I rebelted on my lost knife. "Is it just me or is it getting warmer?"

"It's getting warmer," Trowa confirmed. "We need out of here, now."

"I don't think we need to worry about being shot at," Quatre choked out as he trotted back from the fringe of the woods. "Apparently the people watching decided we were too dangerous; the boats are pulling out now."

That got all of us moving. Without the danger factor, everyone was out of the trees and into clearer air ASAP, with me lagging a bit because of my limp and Heero and Wufei lagging a bit because they were none-too-gently hauling tied up homicidal idiots along with them.

"Son of a bitch," was my rather hoarse contribution when we could see. Now my eyes were tearing up too. I really hate smoke.

Quatre was right. Apparently the people on boat patrol had had enough and both boats were doing their slow, awkward turning around thing so they could run like hell from us crazy people with sticks and guns. I had the urge to laugh my ass off at the fact that we'd scared these people that much. If we were really lucky we'd scared them into some morals, although based on my experience with human nature I really really doubted it.


	13. Chapter 13

Disclaimer: I don't own the GW characters.

A/N: For the record, I tried to post this yesterday and kept getting an error message. I figured out late last evening that it was probably because I needed to update Microsoft Word. I updated this morning, and voila. So here's the second to last bit, which is massively short because, hey, it's the second to last bit. There's an epilogue too that'll go up later in the week and tie up all the loose ends. So, like it, hate it, don't care, you were here, leave me something! And if you find any grammar mistakes/typos please tell me; I hate those. Enjoy.

Chapter 13

We kind of did an awkward now-what stand around for a minute or two before rising heat and more smoke from the forest forced us to go further down the beach to the waterline. Looking back now I could see the fire flickering between the trees. Fire spreads damned fast when it's dry and breezy; I was now very glad for firemen and modern conveniences like fire extinguishers. Not that they'd make a dent in this, but I'd be rather happy if I never saw a big fire again in my life since I was almost fuel for this one.

Brain rambling again.

I looked away from the trees and up towards the sky. I was pretty sure it was past Estimated Help Arrival Time by now. "Hey, Heero, Wufei, how much longer're we gonna be stuck here?" A nice big waft of smoke made me and everyone else take a break to cough. "There may not be any more people with guns, but I'd rather not have survived being hunted to die by unnatural disaster!"

"Not sure. Shouldn't be much longer," Wufei said hoarsely. "Here, everyone do this." He pulled his knife out again−from his left forearm, I noticed since I was looking this time−, used it to rip a strip of cloth off his shirt, wet the shirt bit, and tied it around his nose and mouth. He looked stupid, but if it worked what the hell.

Wufei handed his knife off, Heero got his out, and I unsheathed the one at my left hip. A few minutes later everyone was looking stupid wearing a torn shirt face mask. Well, everyone we cared about; our two prisoners just got to sit there and cough.

I spent a minute staring at the orange flames eating trees; they were actually kind of pretty, as long as they stayed over there and I stayed over here. I did feel kind of bad though, since those trees had kept us alive and because of it were getting burned down.

Speaking of staying alive…I turned a bit to make sure the two boats were still moving in the away from us direction. I had to blink a bit to get those black dots you get from staring at a bright light for too long out of my vision before I could see, but when I could, yep, the boats were a good distance out now…and a couple of the black dots were still there in my vision. I frowned. Then realization smacked me upside the head with a club.

I looked over to Heero, who was shading his eyes and looking out too. "That them?"

"Probably."

I snorted. "At least they weren't late by much. Just all the important bits."

"It's possible they were unable to get a lock on the exact location until the smoke made it obvious."

Various other people had noticed our attention. "Figures the cop's're late," Jazz muttered. Rick elbowed him, ducked the return elbow, and got him in a headlock; methinks Rick had picked up a tad bit of hero-worship for Wufei. That was hysterically funny on a few levels, but since hysterics would be a bad idea right now, I made a point of not looking at that thought. I was getting damned good at that trick.

"They're going to be later," Trowa pointed out wryly. "I'm betting they'll go round up the boats before they get too far away and then come back for us."

"We're stationary, they're not, so you're probably right." Wufei shrugged and squinted out at the steadily growing black specks. "Although it depends some on how many people the force sent. If there are enough ships, they can send some after the boats and some over here."

I tried to count specks and gave it up as hopeless until they got close enough that my eyes stopped doing that blurring trick they do when you're focusing too hard. My leg was starting to hurt noticeably again, so I said screw wet and plunked down on the sand. I was already a complete smoky, beat-up mess and I really didn't care if my butt got wet because of incoming waves.

Anyone else who didn't care about the water ended up sitting next to me; the rest stood since backing up to above the wet sand line put you uncomfortably close to the merrily burning trees. It was warm where we were, and we were a good distance away from the direct line of fire. Pun unintended. No, really, I swear.

Eventually the police cruisers got close enough we could tell there were three of them. By then the two boats from the island had seen them too and were attempting evasive action, so true to Trowa's prediction we had to wait another half hour making jokes about slow-moving fat whales and other such awkward water creatures until the police cruisers managed to corner the other boats. It really was kind of funny to watch, since the boats were built mainly for transport and not speed and apparently maneuvered about as well as those huge buses that tourist companies use. Hence the jokes.

We got bored enough that Max and May started playing tick tack toe in the sand. That was more entertaining that it sounds since every time a wave came up it erased the board, so if they hadn't finished a game yet both of them lied about who had what symbol where and acted indignant when called on it by their opponent. If either of them ever learned chess, they'd probably win any game they played by cheating when their opponent wasn't looking.

At one point Joy decided to make a sand angel and then Ret had to take her deeper into the water to wash as much of the stuck sand off as possible.

Finally the police had control of all vehicles on the water and managed to get themselves to the island and into park.

As a collective group, most of us eyed the people getting into little boats−you know, the ones that are used exclusively to get to shore and otherwise just take up space−and coming over with various degrees of calculation, distrust, annoyance, and much eyerolling. Heero and Wufei were both now taking the "I am competent and not responsible for this shit" posture. I was too tired to do much more than the eyerolling part of the previous description.

Heero and Wufei immediately got pulled off to the side by a harried-looking older woman while another lady with a medical bag did a cursory check on the rest of us. My leg got me some concentrated attention and frowns, which was not reassuring since the lady wouldn't tell me why she was frowning.

Once the medic had determined that none of us were about to croak immediately, we all got haphazardly loaded in shifts onto the small boats and rowed to the big cruisers. It took a good three trips. The two surviving hunters were sent over in one boat, and from there the number of people in each boat varied based on size. I got sent over relatively early because of my leg, although I refused to go anywhere on the boat where I couldn't see everyone else until everyone else got on the boat too. If you have issues with that sentence, blame the sleep dep. Adrenaline crash is hard on the vocabulary.

Now that I was further from the fire and smoke, I pulled the shirt scrap off my face so I looked slightly less stupid. I was slightly gratified that a few of the boat rowers and the medic were all coughing some when they got back on the boat. And then the medic lady yelled at me to get off my leg and I was less amused as I got herded into a room with chairs.

The entire group of Those of Us Who Are Not Police got pulled in there together and given the long talk about rights, need to testify, not skipping town, and all that jazz. We were assured by a very sincere man that we were safe now and anyone who attacked us would be sent to jail by the courts. Yay courts. I was just happy with not being dead or stuck on an island.

Sometime around then Quatre got pulled out and away by the older woman who'd been talking with Heero and Wufei. Trowa spent most of the rest of the time staring off in that direction.

Someone grabbed the radio out of my bag at one point too.

As soon as people were done talking at me and I was sure Heero and Wufei were stuck somewhere else and not coming back soon, I gave in to the sleep dep and conked out for the rest of the ride. Safety was nice.


	14. Chapter 14

Disclaimer: I don't own the GW characters. Sadness.

A/N: Holy shit! *gets buried under classwork* And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason to have pretty much everything written out before publishing. My free time...is not. So anyway, here's the last bit. Beware of tying-up-plotline-ness and bits of sap. It may stick. Hope you have enjoyed yourselves. To the person who brought up sequels...yes, this is very open for one. No, you're not getting it from me. Writing this got rid of the plotbunny that bit me in the ass, I got no more. If someone else wants to carry on, feel free, just tell me where to find it. And please don't abuse my characters too much (I don't own them, but I'm still attached). Anyway, hit the nice little button at the bottom and tell me what you thought. Like it, hate it (I'm assuming not since you stuck through this long), you were here, found a typo... Enjoy. See you again when I finally manage to finish the other fic I'm working on.

Epilogue

The beeping of an alarm clock made me bolt upright. Unfortunately, the sudden change in position ended with me in an uncoordinated sprawl on the floor. Damn alarm. I'd never needed one before.

I disentangled myself, grabbed clothing, and limped my way down the hall to the bathroom. A week after my experience with jumping out of trees and I was still limping, courtesy of the fact that I'd managed to both tear a ligament and squash the hell out of the cartilage in my knee. I had a brace on it, and it was healing, but that didn't make it less annoying.

A shower and clean clothing later I felt slightly better and hauled myself down to the kitchen where Heero was making breakfast and generally being too gracefully awake for being woken by a heart-attack inducing beeping noise in his ear. He handed me scrambled eggs and I eyed it a bit dubiously; I was still getting used to the three square meals of actual food a day idea.

The police had been…okay, there are no adjectives to describe their reaction at the full story of what had been going on. But they had said they'd do something about it. Not that that affected me, it was all legal shit and evidence finding to nail whoever was actually running the kidnap-and-kill operation.

The bit that had affected me was the bureau's determination not to just shove us twelve street kids back onto the streets. Quatre, obviously, had been sent home, with extra bodyguards. But for the rest of us…the ten kids who survived from that last boat had been sent into orphanages and foster homes. I'd have been worried, but I talked to Ret and she said that they'd all try the setup and take off for the streets again if it didn't work out. If that worked for them.

Interestingly enough, Heero and Wufei had spoken for both me and Trowa. We'd been called "fit to be part of the police force" or something sufficiently corny along those lines. What weirded me out the most was that apparently Heero and Wufei's boss had listened to them and we'd both been offered positions, mostly relating to undercover or street work, with the provision we had psychological counseling first. Read as: the bureau didn't want to hire us if we'd lost it because of the island. Since it was the job or an orphanage, I'd taken the job. I can deal with a few couch sessions with an overpaid guy with a clipboard.

Trowa'd decided the same way; I'm pretty sure he had ideas of learning enough bodyguarding tricks to quit the force and go work independently for Quatre. Quatre'd already rigged it so he was in touch with the four of us again, and from the way those two made eyes at each other when they were talking I'd say that plan was a done deal.

Trowa'd immediately gotten into police training and asked for an advance on his first paycheck so he could get a cheap apartment. I, being injured, was slightly further back on the curve and currently restricted to learning the butt-in-a-chair bits of the job.

Which was what put me where I was now. Heero'd offered me use of his spare bedroom while I recovered and I'd taken him up on it. Nothing had happened−yet. I had hopes. And a few plans.

But back to the job side of things, I was turning out to be pretty good at computer stuff when someone showed me how to do it. Asking an older homeless guy to teach me to read, write, and figure way back when had turned out to be a stroke of genius on my part. I'd never be doing calculus, but I was doing pretty well at algebra.

Wufei'd also talked to his boss about maybe starting a training class about street fighting as compared to "official" fighting styles. That might pan out, it might fall through, who knows. I kind of hoped it went through; it would be fun to show a few cops the holes in their defenses.

As I ate the last bit of my eggs I realized Heero was staring at me. "You might as well just say it," I told him.

"The men investigating the money flow of the hunter's ring finally found enough evidence to make an arrest."

"So they caught the bad guy? Good." I was still getting stared at. "Aaaand that's not what you're procrastinating on telling me. Spit it out."

"The court hearing for any and all self-defense actions on the island went through."

I blinked. I hadn't even known that was going on. "Wait, we were getting tried and no one told us?!"

"Not exactly. It wasn't a real trial; Commander Une presented the case in a small, somewhat informal court with the express intention of getting any possible future charges dismissed before they were ever brought to court."

I held a hand up. "Wait, repeat that, only in English this time."

"Basically, the jury was told the entire story and then asked to vote on whether any self-defense killings on the island should be prosecutable or thrown out of court. They were ruled self-defense, no penalties, no future court cases."

"Oh." I really had nothing to say to that. I'm pretty sure I looked like someone had hit me in the head with a board. And there was a mess I hadn't even thought of, neatly shoved under a rug.

Heero shoved his chair out. "We need to leave or we'll be late."

"Yes, sir!" A glance at the dirty plates Heero had snitched when I wasn't looking and was putting in the dishwasher reminded me of something. "I was going to get some groceries during my lunch break. Did you want me to pick something up for dinner?" I had enough of a salary to buy food at least and I was refusing to sponge off Heero completely. Plus I knew where to go to get the best food for the least price, and I was better at bartering than he was. Ha.

"Actually…" Heero pausing. Now I was interested. "I was wondering if you might want to go out to dinner tonight." And he was staring at the wall and not looking at me. It was cute.

"Dinner out sounds good." I was working hard to keep the stupid grin off my face. I mentally debated for a minute and then decided to say screw it. "Do I get to call it a date?" And now I was blushing.

"…If you want to." Now Heero was blushing too.

"It's a date then."

We kind of did the stare at each other thing for a minute until Heero blinked and looked at the clock. "We need to go."

"I'm up." I hauled myself out of my chair and limped over to grab my uniform jacket off the hook by the door. "How's your arm?" I asked as I shrugged the jacket on.

"Almost healed. I have full range of motion back."

"Does that mean you'll be back on active duty soon?" Heero'd been doing butt-in-a-chair work too, just in a different office than me.

"By the end of the week."

"Do me a favor and don't get shot again."

"I can't promise anything." I stuck my tongue out at him as we walked out the door.


End file.
